The Omaha guide., 1933-07-15
BIRTH CONTROL AND NATIONAL POWER

Some interesting and rather sad statistics on the
birthrate and related subjects have lust been released bv
Federal Census Bureau.
Statisticians used to calculate that the population
of the United States would become stationary some time
between 1871 and 1860. Now, the birthrate is declining so
fast that they are bringing that guess closer to the pre-
sent time by several years. The old estimate Of a pop
uation of 140, 1000 to 1910, too, has been revised down
ward to 81, 100000. Our birthrate has dropped from Psi
per 1000 in 1915 to Is per 900 in 1892, the lowest on rec
ord.
The research artists go on to say that we can now
begin to reconcile ourselves to being a nation in which the
older and less energetic and ambitious people will more
and more of them and fewer young people. The United
States in distinctly past its first youth.
...... Why Birth Control .....
Some people are inclined to blame our declining
birthrate on those women who for years have been mar
ttyring themselves in the cause of making birth control in
formation accessible to anybody who wants it. Mrs. Mar
.garet Sanger is the high priestess Of this group.
We doubt that Mrs. Sanger and her followers are
to blame for the birth control that is being more and more
widely practiced in the United States. 1t looks to us as if
these crusaders merely have been expressing a desire to
slow down the propagation Of the species which has been
growing in the United States for a long time; that the
birthrate would be no higher today il Mrs. Sanger had
never talked about birth control.
Every analyst has a different reason to offer for
all this race suicide as Theodore Roosevelt called two
mems desire for more fun or public life and less home
~handicaps, mems dislike of too much responsibility. eco
nomic uncertainties, and so forth and so on.
Well get into the analysis game by offering the
theory that it is a matter Of the differentiation Of species
the scientific principle that the more highly a species
develops the less prolific it's members become. The amoe-
ba, for instance, reproduces by the million. The. Russian
peasant reproduces by the dozen or thereabout The
French, the most highly developed individualists on earth,
reproduce less and less all the time. 1t looks as If Ameri-
cans, highly civilized in the matter of machines and mat
erial comforts, are becoming more and more like the
French in his respect. Certainly our Slavic and Italian
newcomers are much more prolific than our Harvard gra-
duates.
.... Twilight Of The Nordics?
To rage against this decline in the birthrate is
about as useful as to command the tide not to 90 out. But
it does put you in mind Of those melancholy books, 10th
rop Stoddards "The Rising Tide Of Color and Madison
Grants The Passing of the Great Race" Those books
were based on the decline of the Nordic stock, as their
authors saw that decline. Their contents, while disagree
able, are reinforced by these latest birthrate statistics.
There isn't any doubt that a nation whose birthrate
is on the downgrade is itself on the downgrade as far as
its national power goes, though most of its Individual in
habitants may be fine and happy and energetic people.
And maybe it is too much to expect any nation to be a
perennial instead Of an annual, SO to speak.
The Japs and the Chinese, however, seem to have found
the secret of being perennials so far as reproduction Of
their species goes. There are 400, 000, 900 Chinese and 3d.
OO0, 900 full-blooded japanese with no signs of a declining
birthrate in either country, come fire or flood or war or
world depression.
And the moral Of that is, we see it, that our grand
children will have problems of their own to solve, con-
siderably more serious than the problems that challenge
us. New York News)