Population decline

“ There is no importance in an increasing population; on the contrary, if the population of Europe were stationary, it would be much easier to promote economic reform and to avoid war. What is regrettable at present is not the decline of the birth-rate in itself, but the fact that the decline is greatest in the best elements of the population. ”

“ Decline in the agricultural population.2. The shifting of population from agricultural to urban districts has been due partly to the opening up of virgin soils all over the world, partly to the cheapening of the means of communication, but also in large measure to Free Trade. The decline in the agricultural population must entail in time a decline in the strength of the race; for it is from the agricultural population that the best fighting material is drawn and the urban population recruited. ”

“ As we find depopulation one of the effects that is universally occasioned by decline, it must originate in some cause equally general, and that cause must be one attending the state of wealth and greatness, for it does not appear to be a necessary effect of decline. We can very easily conceive a people, degraded and numerous, reduced to live poorly, as they do in Naples, Cairo, and some other particular spots: but taking the whole of those countries together, we find evident marks of a falling off in population ”

“ It has happened more than once that the decline of a period has been frightfully promoted by great plagues, which have swept away in whole masses the remnants of a former and better generation. [252-2] The return of the relatively small population of its childhood to a nation in its senility cannot be ascribed exclusively to a decrease in its means of subsistence and to a less advantageous distribution of them. ”

“ The cities have burgeoned by stealing the farm population. The expansion of the cities is in other words the growth of those employed by the secondary and tertiary industries, and the growth of the secondary and tertiary population represents the decline of the farming population. ”

“ By this method of calculation every decline in the total number of the people will show an increase in their individual wealth until the maximum national wealth coincides with the complete extinction of the nation! In the second place, it assumes that the "sufficient" population for a country is the maximum number for which it could provide a bare living. ”

“ The early modern period contains another notable example of a sudden and unaccountable decline in population. The scene is Spain, which, after playing an active and very prominent part in the world's history, sank quickly into the lethargy from which it has never recovered. It may be noted that here, as in the case of Rome, the decay of population and energy followed a great influx of plundered wealth. On the other hand, the increase of population in our newly-planted North American colonies must have been extremely rapid for two or three generations. ”

“ The more firmly we believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit more easily than the unfit. ”

“ The decline of our agricultural population is not merely a question of local interest. It is one of the most serious national importance, because the increasing proportion of children which year by year are brought up under the unhealthy conditions of town life is beginning to have its effect on the physique of the people and the stamina of the race. ”

“ This remedy will always be resorted to in highly civilized nations, as the pressure of population on subsistence becomes more severe. But the decrease of population means the arrest of growth and progress in the national organism, and eventual decadence. ”

“ It is a fact, that, as we count our increasing millions, we are apt to lose sight of—nevertheless it is a fact—that in what we know of the world’s history decadence of population is as common as increase. Whether the aggregate population of the earth is now greater than at any previous epoch is a speculation which can deal only with guesses. ”

“ In these seasons actual want, or the maladies consequent on it, carry off numbers of the population, which in a succession of favourable years again expands, to be again cruelly decimated. In a more improved state, few, even among the poorest of the people, are limited to actual necessaries, and to a bare sufficiency of those: and the increase is kept within bounds, not by excess of deaths, but by limitation of births. ”

“ I dread, in fact, the completion of the sad work of depopulation and impoverishment which is now rapidly going on. The present evil is not merely, that improvement is stayed, and that the wealth and population of these Colonies do not increase according to the rapid scale of American progress. ”

“ Thus the war, which was the greatest depopulator since the epidemic of the Middle Ages, caused “only a momentary hesitation in the steady onward march of population growth.” If we take any given land area of fixed limits, there must necessarily be an upper limit to the number of people it can support, but this limit will be approached asymtotically and the most rapid rise will be midway between the upper and lower limit, namely, at that point where half the possible resources of subsistence have been drawn upon and utilized. ”

“ What good purpose, divine or human, could be served by keeping an increasing population in a land that cannot produce enough to keep the life in one-half of its people? Nothing but misery, and degradation, and oppression here; happiness, advancement, riches, and freedom on the other side of the water. Is there more than one conclusion?
In spite of all the emigration that has taken place from this country, no one has, we daresay, any real dread of depopulation; the population is increasing over all the land every year, not excepting the Highlands. ”

“ But though improvement may during a certain space of time keep up with, or even surpass, the actual increase of population, it assuredly never comes up to the rate of increase of which population is capable: and nothing could have prevented a general deterioration in the condition of the human race, were it not that population has in fact been restrained. ”

“ Inasmuch as, on this system, any given amount of expenditure, once incurred, would provide not merely a single emigration, but a perpetually flowing stream of emigrants, which would increase in breadth and depth as it flowed on; this mode of relieving overpopulation has a recommendation, not possessed by any other plan ever proposed for making head against the consequences of increase without restraining the increase itself: there is an element of indefiniteness in it; no one can perfectly foresee how far its influence, as a vent for surplus population, might possibly reach. ”

“ But according to the eleventh census the decennial rate of growth of population fell suddenly from over 30%, which the figures had shown between 1870 and 1880, and in every preceding decade of the century, except that of the Civil War, to less than 25%, in spite of an immigration nearly double that of any preceding decade. ”

“ Over-population in the sense that the whole world is too full to contain its habitants, or that it will ever become too full to contain them, is certainly a fallacy, but overpopulation is a lamentable truth in its relative sense. We find evidences of over-population in every old country of the world. The pest of over-population is the existence of poverty, squalor, wretchedness, disease, ignorance, misery, and crime. Low rate of wages, and food dear, here you have two certain indices of relative over-population. ”

“ The circumstance, on the one hand, that the now naturally more numerous marriages effected a rapid increase of population, and, on the other, that the gigantically developing industry of the new era brought on many ills, never known of before, caused the spectre of "overpopulation" to rise anew. Conservative and liberal economists pull since then the same string. We shall show what this fear of so-called overpopulation means; we shall trace the feared phenomenon back to its legitimate source. ”

“ And can there be a doubt that the large disproportion in the distribution of the population between city and country, in the interior, will be lessened, so that, instead of being, as now, only one to five or six, they will rapidly approach the proportion of one to two or three? ”

“ The discouragements to marriage, the consequent vicious habits, war, luxury, the silent though certain depopulation of large towns, and the close habitations, and insufficient food of many of the poor, prevent population from increasing beyond the means of subsistence ”

“ It is no paltry question of an outlet for the surplus products of a mere nation of seventy-five millions that confronts you. Your mathematical professors will tell you that, at the ratio of increase established in this Nation by the census returns for the century just closing, its population would amount during the next century to the bewildering and incomprehensible figure of twelve hundred millions. ”

“ But the overpopulation having taken place, whatever the cause, the only remedy was depletion. No expansion of manufacturing industry, commerce, or mining adequate to the absorption of the surplus population could be expected in time to meet the pressing call for relief. ”

“ If the industry of the inhabitants be not destroyed by fear or tyranny, subsistence will soon increase beyond the wants of the reduced numbers; and the invariable consequence will be, that population which before, perhaps, was nearly stationary, will begin immediately to increase. ”

“ It is apparently corroborated by many obvious facts, such as the prevalence of poverty, vice and misery amid dense populations, the general effect of material progress in increasing population without relieving pauperism, the rapid growth of numbers in newly settled countries and the evident retardation of increase in more densely settled countries by the mortality among the class condemned to want. ”

“ I should expect, therefore, that those countries where subsistence was increasing sufficiency at times to encourage population but not to answer all its demands, would be more subject to periodical epidemics than those where the population could more completely accommodate itself to the average produce. ”

“ It must always have been perfectly well known that population will probably (though not necessarily) increase with every augmentation of the supply of subsistence, and may, in some instances, inconveniently press upon, or even for a certain time exceed, the number properly corresponding to that supply. Nor could it ever have been doubted that war, disease, poverty—the last two often the consequences of vice—are causes which keep population down. ”

“ It is the law of diminishing returns from land, involving as it does—though only hypothetically—the prospect of a continuously increasing difficulty in obtaining the necessary sustenance for all the members of a society, that gives the principal importance to population as an economic factor. ”

“ The evidence of this indolent misery is given in the narrowness of the population, which, at the beginning of the last century, scarcely reckoned a million of souls: and this, too, in a country of remarkable fertility, free from all habitual disease, with a temperate climate, and a breadth of territory containing at this hour eight millions, and capable of supporting eight millions more. ”

“ And at the conclusion of the first century, the population would be a hundred and seventy-six millions, and the means of subsistence only equal to the support of fifty-five millions; leaving a population of a hundred and twenty-one millions totally unprovided for.
“Taking the whole earth instead of this island, emigration would of course be excluded; and supposing the present population equal to a thousand millions, the human species would increase as the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. ”

“ The mass of the people would, upon this supposition, be obliged to live harder, and a greater number would be crowded together in one house, and it is not surely improbable that these were among the natural causes that produced the three sickly years. These causes may produce such an effect, though the country, absolutely considered, may not be extremely crowded and populous. In a country even thinly inhabited, if an increase of population take place, before more food is raised, and more houses are built, the inhabitants must be distressed in some degree for room and subsistence. ”

“ In one decennium such a town may, owing to brisk trade, have a rapid increase of working population with many children, and in the next decennium in consequence of emigration or transmigration there may be little or no increase. The declining birth-rate, which is having a greater effect on the number of population than the declining death-rate, is another cause of disturbance which increases the difficulty in forming a correct estimate of the population in intercensal periods. ”

“ To reintegrate the uprooted population groups, which were socially, economically and politically marginalized, and create the conditions that would allow them to be a dynamic factor in the economic, social, political and cultural development of the country ”

“ In the back settlements, where the sole employment is agriculture, and vicious customs and unwholesome occupations are little known, the population has been found to double itself in fifteen years. Even this extraordinary rate of increase is probably short of the utmost power of population. ”