Life & Death

Britons last week were reading a book called Parents Revolt by a couple named Titmuss. Young Richard Titmuss of the Health Ministry and his wife Kathleen are among the sundry Britons who, amid their war worries, have found time for the fear that the British are a dying race.

For several decades Britain's birth rate has been falling. Among those aroused about it is the University of Edinburgh's Professor F. A. E. Crew. Cried he recently:" A people's birth rate is the measure of their faith in themselves. We must build a social structure which welcomes babies for their own sake. This is no conflict of armies. It is a battle of the birth rate!" The British press has noted that Britain now has a million and a half fewer babies and a million and a half more pet dogs than at the time of the Boer War.

An elaborate statistical case can be made to prove that the white race in general is approaching death. Most white birth rates are falling. Even Mussolini's plaudits and prizes for parents have not noticeably affected Italy's trend. The results of Hitler's baby campaign are doubtful. Britain's Population Investigation Committee has declared that the only warring white nation whose population is increasing is Russia, that in 50 years, at present rates, Russia's 186 millions will have grown to 300 millions.*

In May the British Government published a white paper, Current Trends of Population in Great Britain, which showed how the average increase of population has been slowing down:

1891-1901 1.13%

1901-1911 .98 %

1911-1921 .46 % (sharp drop during World War I)

1921-1931 .46 %

1931-1938 .44%

But post-war conditions might raise emigration from Britain. Also, with birth and death rates both falling, Britain's population would have an increasing percentage of oldsters.

To Britons, who like their older men but do not like them perennially predominant, these were alarming prospects.

In cold figures the only cold comfort came from the fact that the birth rate for 1942's first quarter was higher than in any similar period since 1931. While World War I had dissipated the procreative instinct, World War II, during which much of the army has stayed home, seemed to be stimulating it.

* Cracked a U.S. flyer lately returned from China: "China's population before the war was 400 million. By the end of the war China's population will be 500 million. Why? Well, the noise of the Jap planes going over at night waked them up."

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