replacement of native by foreign stock. That if the foreigners had not come' the native element would long have filled the places the foreigners usurped, I entertain no doubt. The competency of the American stock to do this it would be absurd to question, in the face of such a record as that for 1790 to 1830.

General Walker's contention has been generally accepted by writers on immigration and has, so far as I know, never been expressly refuted. Such authors as Prescott F. Hall, connected with the agitation for immigration restriction, have made a great deal of Walker's argument, which naturally carries considerable weight on account of the name of the eminent man who propounded it. The United States Industrial Commission says in its report: "It is a hasty assumption which holds that immigration during the Nineteenth Century has increased the total population." Professor John R. Commons takes this view. F. A. Bushee, in an article on the declining birth-rate and its cause, makes the statement that "it is true that the multiplication of foreign peoples has seriously checked the growth of the old American stock." A writer in a recent number of the American Journal of Sociology states the matter in the most uncharitable way when he says that "our immigrants are not additions to our total population, but supplanters of native children, to whom they deny the privilege of being born."3

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On what evidence are these statements based? The statistical evidence is contained in General Walker's article, previously cited.4 It is brief enough. The gist of it is contained in the table on P. 344.

The population of the United States in 1840 and 1850 practically coincided with forecasts made by Watson before the immigration movement had assumed any magnitude, and that in spite of the

* Report of the Industrial Commission, XV, 277. Popular Science Monthly, LXIII, 355.

3 Henry Pratt Fairchild, "The Paradox of Immigration," American Journal of Sociology, XVIII, 263.

4 A suggestion of what prompted General Walker to take this view of the influence of immigration on natural increase is obtained from his statement to the effect that "If the birth-rate among the previously existing population did not suffer a sharp decline coincidently with that enormous increase of immigration, and, perhaps, in consequence of it, the Census of 1890 cannot be vindicated." ("The Great Count of 1890," Discussions in Economics and Statistics, II, 121.)

fact that between 1830 and 1840, 599,000 immigrants came to the United States and between 1840 and 1850, 1,713,000. Watson's estimates are projections into the future of previous rates of increase and, so the argument runs, had the immigrants not arrived those previous rates would have been maintained, and the population would have justified Watson's forecast without any reinforcement from outside.

That this supposition is a possibility is granted, but that the figures produced amount to proof cannot be conceded. For support the defenders of Walker's theory turn to Malthus and the principles of population. They maintain that the American working man was accustomed to lead an independent and self-respecting existence, that the immigrant arrived and introduced his "hingeless and carpetless" standard of living, and that the American found himself unable to compete with the newcomer and consequently refused to have children whose lot would be worse than that of their father.

When this explanation is analyzed, it appears so overstrained and far-fetched as almost to appeal to one's sense of humor. Is there then no other way of accounting for the decline in the birthrate? As a matter of fact birth-rates almost invariably decline when a country becomes more settled and its population more urbanized. General Walker himself says:'

That which caused the growth of numbers through the earlier decades of our history to be so strikingly uniform was the principle of population operating absolutely without check among a people spread sparsely over the soil, with little of wealth and little of extreme poverty, and with nothing to make child-bearing a burden.

"The Great Count of 1890," Discussions in Economics and Statistics, II, 121.

To cite just one example of a country which is somewhat similar to the United States in sparseness of population but which has only a small amount of immigration, Australia today is complaining of its constantly declining rate of increase and extolling the United States with its growing population as an example to be emulated.1 The population of Australia is not dense, but the proportion of city dwellers is very high and the birth-rate is low and declining without the influence of immigration.

Perhaps the best statement of the reasons for a decline in the birth-rates of the American people is found in an article by John S. Billings, the leading authority on vital statistics in this country. Dr. Billings believes that the declining birth-rate is due in part to the migration from rural districts to the cities, the increase of wealth and luxury, the emancipation of women, all of which phenomena tend to diminish the proportion of early marriages and favor an increase in divorce and prostitution. Dr. Billings thinks, furthermore, that voluntary prevention of child-bearing is an important influence tending to diminish the birth-rate. There are more persons now than formerly who know how to prevent child-bearing, and the increasing cost of living, together with a constantly growing standard of expenditures, makes it desirable for an increasing proportion of families to consist of a small number of persons. The moral scruples against the prevention of child-bearing are being overcome by many families. In a word, the declining birth-rate is due largely to the growth of the number of families that find it desirable to restrict the number of children, together with the spread of information of the means to that end and the weakening of the power of moral objections to prevention.

These causes appear to be much more plausible than the contention that the arrival of immigrants is responsible for the decline in the American birth-rate. That the growth of the native population of the United States during the nineteenth century was remarkably large, in spite of this decline, is shown by the United States Census Bureau in its report on A Century of Population Growth, 1790-1900. A careful estimate made in this report shows

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1 Official Yearbook of the Commonwealth of Australia, Statistics for Period 1901-09, III, 126.

that of the 67 million white inhabitants in 1900, 35 million were descendants of the population of 1800, while 32 million were later arrivals, and their descendants. In 1800 the white population was about 4 millions, so that the population in 1900 was eight times as great as that of a century earlier, while the most rapid growth shown by any country in Western Europe was that of Belgium, which tripled during the century. The sturdy population of 1800 has made, it appears, a fairly good record of growth during the nineteenth century.

A necessary assumption of the Walker theory is that the first indications of a marked decline in birth-rates coincide with the first great waves of immigration. A valuable piece of evidence in this connection is contained in a paper presented to the American Statistical Association at its meeting in St. Louis in December, 1910, by Professor Walter F. Willcox of Cornell University. Professor Willcox by a series of careful estimates obtains the following figures for the number of children per 1,000 women fifteen to forty-four years of age:

The preceding table [comments Professor Willcox] shows that the proportion of children to women of child-bearing age and so probably the birth-rate in the United States was not stationary or increasing prior to 1860 as has usually been supposed and as the figures for 1850-60 taken alone would indicate. On the contrary that decade was probably the only one during the entire century marked by an increasing birth-rate, and the rapidity of the decline between 1810 and 1840 was about the same as that between 1860 and 1900. The main conclusion that the decrease in the proportion of children began in the United States as early as 1810 and has continued at about the same rate ever since is clearly established by the evidence.

In view of this unequivocal conclusion of so careful a statistician as Professor Willcox, what becomes of the theory that the decline of birth-rates is primarily due to immigration? Did the native

I Walter F. Willcox, "The Change in the Proportion of Children in the United States and the Birth-Rate in France During the Nineteenth Century," Publications of the American Statistical Association, XII, 491.

Americans of 1810 and 1820 anticipate the influx of the following decades and refrain from having offspring, for fear that their children might be obliged to compete with those who were at that time being reared in Germany and Ireland, but who were destined to invade these shores? Is there not every probability that the decline in birth-rates simply reflected the steady industrialization and urbanization of the continent, while the influx of immigrants was an independent movement having no direct connection with native birth-rates?

cause.

General Walker in the passage quoted above makes the statement that the decline in the rate of population growth during the past century and the increase of immigration either is a coincidence, or else the one phenomenon is to the other in the relation of effect to This statement overlooks a possibility which seems to the present writer to contain the true explanation of the two parallel phenomena. The decline in birth-rates and the growth of immigration, according to this view, represent two effects of the same cause, namely, the industrial development and the urbanization of the continent. In 1790 there were in the United States two cities having a population of over 25,000; in 1910 there were 228 such cities. In 1790 the population of the cities formed 1.6 per cent of the total population of the country; in 1910 the city population formed 31.0 per cent of the total for continental United States. This growth of city population is easily susceptible of statistical measurement and is quoted here because it is an index to a complex mass of social and economic phenomena. It represents the rapid growth of industries, the development of educational facilities, the increasing demand for luxuries, the growing burdensomeness of large families, the emancipation of women-in a word, the rapid progress of all the causes which Dr. Billings assigns for the decline in birth-rates. On the other hand it is the rapid development of industries, the urgent demand for labor, that is the fundamental cause of immigration. The immigrant comes in reply to this demand and by his coming increases the possibilities of the rapid development of the country. Says Richmond Mayo Smith:"

The third factor (besides land and railroads) in this development has been immigration. Thereby the growth of population has been reinforced by an Emigration and Immigration, New York, 1890, pp. 57 ff.

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