for Harvard and Bowdoin, respectively, must be compared with the number of surviving children for the native American population of the state of Massachusetts, which is 1.9, less, according to my own observations.
Less than 2 surviving offspring to reproduce the race for all native American marriages, 3.1 for those of the limited group of college graduates!
This indicates a remarkable change since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who tells us that 'one and all considered each married couple in this country produced 8[1] children.' Though this is not a conclusion drawn from statistical study, it is yet indicative, and in harmony with my own deduction from genealogical records. Whatever the precise figures be, all observations agree as to the high fecundity of the American colonies, and tell of the great change which has taken place in one short century.
From conditions better than those in any other country, five and more children to the family, such as led to the Malthusian theory of superfecundation and to the fear of over population of the earth's surface, we have passed in hardly one hundred years to our present condition, with a fecundity for the native-born below that of any other country, such that the American race is unable to reproduce itself with a birth rate of 17 per 1,000 population,[2] hardly 3 children to the family!
These facts I first presented in 1901,[3] with records up to the end
- ↑ Let no one discredit this and call it impossible! Though surprising to us with a knowledge of the present, these figures are even exceeded at this day by the French-Canadian with a fecundity of 9.2 children to the family, as I gather from a study of one thousand families found in the records of Quebec life insurance companies: 9.3 for the rural, 9.0 for the urban population, is the fecundity of the child-bearing woman, not the fecundity per marriage, but nearly so, as sterile marriages are rare. The birth rate of the Russian peasantry in the Kaluga district, near Moscow, is 7.2 children to the marriage. Throughout Norway it is 5.8 at the present time, as much as it was in the American colonies at the time of the Declaration of Independence.
- ↑ That the native population is dying out, and that at an alarming pace, is evident, not alone from a birth rate much lower than that of France, but also from a comparison with that of Berlin. In France the birth rate was 22.5 per 1,000 living population; that of the native population of Massachusetts is 17 per 1,000; in Berlin, 1891-95, with 10 births for every 100 women of childbearing age, the births were one ninth behind the number necessary to keep the population stationary, whilst in Massachusetts the birth rate is much lower, 6.3 births for 100 adult American born women of child-bearing age. The result is self-evident.
- ↑ The subject has been treated in the following papers by the writer: 'The Increasing Sterility of American Women, with Increase of Miscarriage and Divorce, Decrease of Fecundity.' Engelmann, Jour, of the Amer. Med. Assoc., October 5, 1901. 'Decreasing Fecundity Concomitant with the Progress of Obstetrics and Gynecology.' Engelmann, Philadelphia Med. Jour., January 18, 1902. 'Birth and Death Rate as influenced by Obstetric and Gynecic Practice.' Engelmann, Boston Med. and Surg. Jour., May 15, 1902.
