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358 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIf.S
larges. The sudden withdrawal of the checks in this
view would thus be the immediate cause of the singu-
larly rapid growth of population in the early part of
last century. It is quite in accordance with this' fact
that a generation or two of prosperity, raising the scale
of living, would diminish the rate of growth as com-
pared with this abnormal development, without affect-
ing in any degree the permanent reproductive energy
of the people.
3. It is also obvious that one explanation of the
decline in birth-rate, and of the rate of the excess of
births over deaths, may in part be the greater vitality of
the populations concerned, so that the composition of
the population is altered by an increase of the relative
numbers of people not in the prime of life, thus altering
the proportion of the people at the child-producing
ages to the total. This would be too complex a subject
for me to treat in the course of a discursive address.
N or would it explain the whole facts, which include,
for instance, an almost stationary annual number of
births -in the United Kingdom for more than ten years
past, notwithstanding the largely increased population.
But the case may be one where a great many partial
explanations contribute to elucidate the phenomena,
so that this particular explanation cannot be over·
looked.
4. There remains, however, the question which many
people have rushed in to disdlss, viz., whether the re-
productive power of the populations in question is
quite as great as it was fifty or sixty years ago. We
have already heard in some quarters, not merely that
the reproductive energy has diminished, but sugges-
tions that the populations in question are following the
example of the French, where the rate of increase of
the population has almost come to an end. Apart,
however, from the suggestions above made as to the
abnormality of ·the increase fifty or sixty years ago, so
that some decline now is rather to be expected than not,
I would point out that the subject is about as full of
