The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  Preventing Births: A Brief Aside on Contraception

  Lower infant mortality and the longer life expectancy with which it was associated was followed, as it almost always came to be, with a drop in the number of children being born per woman (lower fertility rate). But how was this being achieved? Effective contraception was not available at this time, certainly not cheaply and accessibly to the population as a whole. The convenience and simplicity of the Pill was decades ahead and what was available was expensive, cumbersome and difficult to get hold of.

  Contraception has existed in some form since at least the days of ancient Egypt, and at least one method of controlling births–coitus interruptus– is recorded in the Bible. There is evidence that the ancient Egyptians understood that prolonged breastfeeding helped spread conceptions out, resulting in fewer in total, and this in part explains why in ancient Egypt, annual population growth was probably barely 0.1% on average.5 The Spartans famously practised infanticide, and this was probably common in many societies, although largely obscure, until fairly recent times, along with abortion. The eleventh-century Persian thinker Avicenna recommended spermicides, potions to take away passion and what is now called the rhythm method. The Catholic Church opposed such potions (although not the careful timing of sex) in the thirteenth century, instituting a Catholic pro-natalism which has not yet been formally abandoned by the Church (although the data suggests that it is now ignored by most Catholics). Sheaths were openly on sale in major European cities by at least the eighteenth century, albeit often illegally, often as much to prevent the spread of venereal diseases as to check conception.6 Delaying weaning was in many places understood to delay the next conception.

  In many places, legal blocks hindered those seeking to plan their families in any but the most natural ways. The American doctor Charles Knowlton was prosecuted, fined and sentenced to hard labour in the 1830s for publicising his book The Fruits of Philosophy, or the Private Companion of Young Married People. In the 1870s it was published in Britain by Charles Bradlaugh and his extraordinary companion Annie Besant (a one-time vicar’s wife, organiser of the matchgirls’ strike and later a founder of the Indian National Congress). Bradlaugh and Besant were also prosecuted, with the perverse outcome that the trial probably did much to popularise the use of rudimentary contraception among those who could afford it.

  Although opposition to publicising contraception was fierce, other opinions were coming increasingly to the fore. Malthus had urged restraint and late marriage, but Richard Carlile, a populariser of birth control among the working classes, thought this a bad idea, claiming that ‘women who have never had sexual commerce when about twenty-five years of age… become pale and languid… nervous fidgetiness takes possession of them’.7 The complete dominance of the medical profession by men at this time–and often unimaginative ones at that–gave rise to all sorts of strange ideas about sex. William Acton, the best-known writer of the nineteenth century on sexual complaints, suggested that ‘a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to satisfy him and were it not for the desire of maternity, would far rather be relieved of his attentions.’8 To some extent the fall in fertility was achieved by later marriage. More women put off marriage, perhaps assisted by the start of what could be deemed ‘middle-class’ jobs for women. (The typewriter was invented in 1868 and its use became widespread in the decades thereafter, creating a demand for typists and secretaries, often considered a suitable and ‘respectable’ female occupation.) In the 1870s barely one bride in ten was over thirty on her wedding day; by the Edwardian period (specifically 1906–11) the share was nearly twice as high.

  So fewer women of childbearing age were married, and many were now spending all or at least part of their fertile years outside of marriage, at a time when notions of respectability were becoming more widespread and fewer births were occurring outside marriage. And not only were more women staying outside marriage for longer (and becoming less likely to have children outside marriage); even within marriage, birth rates were falling. In 1905 The Lancet calculated that 300,000 fewer children each year were being born to married couples than would have been the case if the birth rate had remained at the level of the 1870s.

  It is impossible to know whether this was achieved through abstinence from sex or careful timing (either within the act itself or within the menstrual cycle) or a bit of both; exactly what was going on in the bedrooms of our great-great-grandparents remains something of a mystery. Nevertheless, there are some intriguing clues. At the top end of society, shortly after the First World War Margot Asquith, wife of former Prime Minister Herbert (Henry) Asquith, reportedly spoke to British politician Oswald Mosley’s first wife Cynthia (the daughter of Lord Curzon and an early Labour woman MP) after the birth of her first child, warning her not to rush another: ‘Henry always withdrew in time, such a noble man.’9 In this Asquith was obviously more adept or concerned than his monarch’s father, the late Prince Albert, of whom Queen Victoria complained: ‘Oh! If those selfish men–who are the causes of all one’s misery, only knew what their poor slaves go through! What suffering–what humiliation to the delicate feelings of a poor woman… especially with those nasty doctors.’10

  At the lower end of society, there is no reason to imagine that practices were all that different to that of the Asquiths, although the memoir of Aida Hayhoe, a woman living in the Fens in rural eastern England, suggests an alternative approach, recounting how she would ‘sit up at night, after my husband had gone to bed. He say [sic] “Aren’t you coming to bed?” I say, “I’ve got to mend these before I go to bed. They’ll want them in the morning. You can go but these have got to be done tonight.” ’ Mrs Hayhoe’s motives were clear: ‘See, I had three children. And I didn’t want no more. My mother had fourteen children and I didn’t want that. So if I stayed up mending, my husband would be asleep when I came to bed. That were simple, weren’t it?’11

  While the battle for the acceptance and popularisation of birth control continued, new allies were found for those who favoured it, namely eugenicists, who valued and wished to manage the quality of what they unapologetically referred to as the country’s human ‘stock’.

  When the trends towards smaller families later hit other countries, there came to be a distinct gap between the modernising populations in towns and cities, who rapidly adopted the nuclear family, and the peasants and agricultural labourers who remained in the countryside and continued to have large families. Here England was an exception. Given the country’s small size, rural dwellers of England were perhaps too close to cities not to be heavily influenced by them. A sizeable town was almost always only a short railway ride away from even the remotest rural dwelling. There was nothing equivalent to la France profonde, a lost imaginary arcadia removed from modern influences, or to the American backwoods, never mind deepest, darkest peasant Russia, a day’s trek or more from the nearest road. So even in the countryside, the English adopted the modern ways of the town and moved quickly to smaller family size.

  Mass Emigration Continues

  Between 5 and 7 million people left the UK (including Ireland) in the second half of the nineteenth century. Once large flows of immigrants started to go to the US from more distant and poorer parts of Europe such as Italy and the Jewish Pale in Russia (the western parts of Russia to which Jews were restricted), migrants from the British Isles tended increasingly to be diverted to the colonies, mostly Canada and Australia, and away from the US. This overall high level of emigration reduced population growth at home. In one way, simply by dint of the numbers leaving, emigration reduced population growth at home. On the other hand, as we have seen, the productive farming many of these emigrants engaged in and the cheap food they produced and exported boosted living standards of the working class back at home and helped them live longer, thus tending to increase the UK’s population size.

  As the gathering of population data improved, three
incontestable factors were revealed to be at work in determining the growth of population. First, women were having fewer children–partly by delaying marriage, partly by a greater awareness and availability of methods to control conception–but also because of past population growth, there were still more young women having children than there had been, and so still plenty of births. Second, fewer people were dying each year, particularly fewer young children at least from the start of the twentieth century. Third, large-scale emigration continued and immigration from outside the UK (which at this time included Ireland) was still very limited. (The exception was immigration of Jews from Russia, mostly between 1880 and 1905, which never exceeded much more than 10,000 in any one year and produced a population of British Jews which never amounted to more than 1% of the total population, so not big enough significantly to affect total size.)12 The net impact of these three effects was a population which continued to grow, but whose growth was beginning to fall from about 1.35% per annum in the first half of the twentieth century to only a little over 1% in the second half. A slower annual population rise over such a long time meant that the population at the end of the period was a lot smaller than it would have been had it continued growing at the same pace. Meanwhile, on the other side of the North Sea, a similar story was unfolding, resembling that of the United Kingdom but a few decades behind. And as England was starting to slow down, so Germany was just getting into its stride.

  Germany Awakens

  The first half of the twentieth century is often identified by a global clash between Britain and Germany. At the start of the nineteenth century, that would have been surprising. The history that tends to be taught in schools focuses on the efficiency–and ultimately the genocidal cruelty–of the German war machine and the size and power of its industry and economy. It is widely known that Germany was able to take on the combined might of the British Empire, Russia and the US by 1914, even if it was not able to overcome them, but it is often forgotten that in the early nineteenth century, as Britain was well into its industrial revolution, Germany was not only still politically divided into dozens of mini-states but still economically fairly backward and widely seen as a land of poets and thinkers, of princelings and petty dukedoms, more medieval than modern, more fairy-tale castle than blast furnaces.

  This was the Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Beethoven and Schubert, of Kant and Hegel, a land rich in thought and art and creativity but constitutionally and regionally fragmented, agricultural and, compared with bustling London and Paris or booming Manchester, not at the cutting edge of nineteenth-century urban progress. There are many aspects to Germany’s rise to prominence as a challenger of the world’s mightiest powers, political, industrial, economic and military included, and the demographic one is often overlooked. Germany, Bismarck said, was built on blood and iron. We too often think about the iron–the industrial might which provided the heavy weaponry–and too rarely about the blood–not only the quality but also the quantity of young German men willing and able to die for the fatherland.

  In sheer numbers, Germany (by which is meant the territory which was finally to become a single empire in 1871 after Bismarck’s wars of unification) always had a larger population than the UK, but the balance changed over the course of the nineteenth century. In 1800 the UK’s population was less than half that of Germany. With the UK’s developmental head start, this rose to two-thirds in 1900, but at that stage it was falling back quickly, given its lower birth rate and higher emigration, and this meant that by 1913 the British gains had fallen back to 62%.13

  Germany’s demographic rise can be seen in relation to France as well as to Britain. A century before the outbreak of the First World War, during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, there were around 10% more French men and women than Germans in the fragmented states that would become Bismarck’s empire. By 1914, the French population had sunk to less than 60% of Germany’s. Germany had successfully joined Britain in a post-Malthusian world of industrialisation, urbanisation, high birth rates (which persisted for a time) and plunging mortality rates. France, by contrast, experienced a quite different demographic fate, one marked by low fertility and low population growth, despite low emigration. German population growth relative to that of its neighbours caused considerable concern in Britain and created a kind of paranoia in France, which was still highly conscious of its defeat by Prussia in 1870 in a conflict that saw Paris occupied and which led directly to the unification of Germany a year later.

  Germany’s rise had a double impact. If it had remained a country divided up into a patchwork of states, the growth of its population would not have mattered that much. On the other hand, had it united but remained fairly modest in population terms, it could not have posed such a challenge to its neighbours. It was the combination of political unity and population growth which allowed Germany to be the major player it became, even if this turned out not to be enough to achieve either the European or global domination it came to seek.

  What was happening in Germany was no more than a later replay of what had already happened in the UK. Twenty-five million Germans in 1800 became 40 million by 1870–an annual average rise of about two-thirds of one per cent–and 67 million by 1913, an annual average rise that was almost twice as fast.14 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the land of poets and thinkers was turning into the land of blood and iron, not to mention steel and coal. The industrialisation which had come to Britain was coming to a Germany with many of the same advantages Britain had, namely a sober, relatively literate and hard-working population and access to the necessary raw materials. Between 1880 and 1913 German manufactures rose from a third of Britain’s to overtake them.15

  Conditions in early industrial Germany were harsh, just as they had been in Britain, but as in Britain they slowly improved, eventually providing the urban worker and his family with a higher living standard than his peasant forebears had been able to hope for. That meant more children could survive, people could live longer and so at first, while fertility remained high, the population grew fast. Like Britain, Germany was escaping the Malthusian trap. But whereas Britain had been at the cutting edge, where progress was hard won, Germany was following a now beaten path, and could therefore move faster. This is a trend which will show itself as the story of the human tide unfolds. The later a country comes to industrialisation, the quicker it is able to adopt it, and the faster the transformation of its society, so the faster the initial population growth.

  It is true that German women were starting to have fewer children by the end of the nineteenth century, but infant mortality was tumbling too, helping to hold up population growth. Like Britain, Germany benefitted from the arrival of cheap food from beyond Europe (and also from Russia), as well as an increased output from home as the area of cultivated land grew and technology improved. Farm machinery grew more efficient and fertilisers were more widely used. And while the German government was more prepared to prop up and protect its farmers through tariffs, which meant its population did not enjoy the full benefits of cheap food from overseas, and although Germany had no vast empire to exploit but merely colonial scraps, the benefits of cheaper food and healthier cities were considerable nevertheless. The government of the newly unified country put a stress on education and a welfare state, both of which helped people at the lowest levels of society to escape the kinds of lives associated with high infant mortality and, even for many who survived infancy, an early death. When Bismarck unified the country, the average German could not expect to live to forty; by the outbreak of the First World War, he or she could expect to live to almost fifty. In this, Germany still lagged behind Britain, but it was clearly catching up.16

  Looking beneath the surface, it is possible to gain some insight into how the picture varied within and across the country. Unlike in Britain, there was a real gap between the number of children had by women in towns and those in the countryside. Country people in Germany continued to have large families while their urba
n cousins started to adopt smaller ones, a pattern different to Britain’s but more typical of the subsequent pattern elsewhere. The larger the town, the fewer children in the family. (This came to be seen later in the Nazi concept of the healthy, fertile peasant, uncorrupted by city life, continuing to produce babies for the master race, as against weakened and decadent townsfolk, who were too diverted by material pursuits to do their childbearing duty for the fatherland.) At a national level it mattered, because as more and more people came to live in towns and cities, the country as a whole came increasingly to reflect urban rather than rural patterns. As the German population swelled, so it became increasingly urban; Berlin, for example, grew from less than 200,000 to over 2 million between 1800 and 1910.

  As well as differences between town and country, there were class differences, and here the picture was much more like the one in Britain. Generally, the poorer the family, the larger the family; traditionally higher infant mortality among the poor had meant that the families of the richest were the largest, but with the adoption of contraception from the top of society, filtering only gradually downward, and generally improving survival rates, this pattern was reversed. Just as the urban–rural divide came to be a pattern which repeats itself again and again across the world, so too did the class divide. Large families came to be associated with the poor, the uneducated and the primitive. The nuclear family of one, two or at most three children came to be seen as the hallmark of richer and more urban people, wishing to limit their family size in order to give their children a head start in life and able and willing, by whatever means available, to practise some form of birth control. Later marriage in Germany, as in the UK, was part of the picture of falling fertility.