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Show 174 THE DESCENT OF l\'l:AN. PART f. namely, the fact that the very poor and reckless, who are often degraded by vice, almost invariably marry early, whilst the careful and frugal, who are generally otherwise virtuous, marry late in life, so that they may be able to support themselves and their children in comfort. Those who marry early produce within a given period not only a greater number of generations, but, as shewn by Dr. Duncan/9 they produce many more children. The children, moreover, that are born by mothers during the prime of life are heavier and larger, and therefore probably more vigorous, than those born at other periods. Thus the reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case : " The care" less, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like "rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, am" bitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his " faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, '' passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, "marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a "land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a ';thousand Celts-and in a dozen generations five-sixths "of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of "the property, of the power, of the intellect, would ' ' belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. H In the eternal 'struggle for existence,' it would be " the inferior and less faYoured race that had prevailed "-and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities " but of its faults." There are, however, some checks to this downward tendency. We have seen that the intemperate suffer 19 , '' 0~ the Laws of t~e J<'ertility of Women," in 'Transact. Royal Soc .. E,dinburg~l, vol. xx1v. p. 287. Eee, also, Mr. Galton, • Hereditary Gem us, p. 352-357, for observations to the above effect.; CHAP. Y. CIVILISED NATIONS. 175 from a high rate of mortality, and the extremely profligate leave few offspring. The poorest classes crowd into towns, and it has been proved by Dr. Stark from the statistics of ten years in Scotland,20 that at all ages the death-rate is higher in towns than in rural districts "and during the first five years of life the town death~ "rate is almost exactly double that of the rural districts.'~ As these returns include both the rich and the poor, no <loubt more than double the number of births would be requisite to keep up the number of the very poor inhabit~ nts in the town~, relatively to those in the country. ~It~ women, ~arnage at too early an age is highly InJUrwus ; for It has been found in France that, " twice "as many wives under twenty die in the year, as died out "of the same number of the unmarried." The mortality, also, of husbands under twenty is "excessively high," 21 but what the cause of this may be seems doubtful. Lastly, if the men who prudently delay marrying until they can bring up their families in comfort., were to. select, ~s they o~ten do, women in the prime of life, the rate of mcrease m the better class would be only slightly lessened. It was established from an enormous body of statistics taken during 1853, that the unmarried men throughou; France, between the ages of twenty and eighty, die in a much larger proportion than the married: for instance out of every 10?0 unmarried men, between the ages of' twen~y and thirty~ 11·3 annually died, whilst of the marned only 6·5 died.22 A similar law was proved to 20 :Tenth Annual Report of Births, Deaths, &c., in Scotland,' 1867. p. XXIX, 21 These quotations arc taken from our highest authority on such questwns, namely, Dr. Farr, in his paper" On the Influence of Marria"'e on the Mortality of the French People," read before the Nat. Ass;'c. for the Promotion of Social Science, 1858. 22 Dr. Farr, ibid. The quotations given below are extracted from the same striking paper. |