by Paul Morland
Finally, a further investigation of the national data for Germany reveals that there was something of a Catholic–Protestant divide, with the former having larger families and taking later and more slowly to artificial birth control.17 This divide becomes fairly common within countries (Germany, the USA, French-speaking versus English-speaking Canada) and when comparing countries (Italy versus Sweden, Ireland versus Britain) until well into the second half of the twentieth century, although it declines thereafter as Catholic obedience to Church strictures on birth control wanes.
In short, although German families were shrinking by the time of the First World War, they were still bigger than those in Britain, and mortality was falling quickly. These two factors fuelled the population rise in the half-century or so before 1914. In addition, there was another major factor driving German population growth at this time, in sharp contrast to Britain’s: that is, falling emigration.18 British emigration had been higher to start with; in the 1880s, for example, it was twice the level of German emigration. But by the period immediately preceding 1914 it was nine times the level.
Germans had left their home country throughout the nineteenth century in search of a better life overseas, often going to the US where they formed a large share of the population. President Eisenhower’s family came from Saarland, in western Germany, and Donald Trump’s father’s family came from Karlstadt in south-west Germany. However, once Germany started to industrialise and particularly after its unification, there were more opportunities at home. So while the wider English-speaking world and particularly the lands of the Empire offered an enticing prospect for many Britons, where they would find family links and a familiar language and political system, the appeal of emigrating to the alien Anglosphere diminished for Germans once their home country went from a patchwork quilt to a united and fast-developing state. In a sense, unguided though it may have been, the migration patterns of these two great countries, the UK and Germany, were reflected in their strategies in the twentieth century. Germany’s burgeoning population at home allowed it eventually to field great armies on the battlefields of the Eastern and Western Fronts in both world wars. Britain’s mass emigration meant it could raise a smaller army from its home population but could call on the assistance of a worldwide network in wartime, for food, equipment and men.
Russia Stirs
As the nineteenth century wore on, Britain became less and less confident that the future belonged to it and its colonial offspring. Hubristic voices like those of Rhodes became rarer, and more often voices came to be heard like those of Rudyard Kipling, who in his 1897 poem Recessional wrote:
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
More than the fall of the biblical Nineveh and Tyre, it was the decline of the Roman Empire that haunted the British. Population growth pointed to who would eclipse the British Empire. The United States was steaming ahead, its population far exceeding the UK’s by the end of the nineteenth century and its capacity to maintain a large population much greater. Here the British could comfort themselves with the fact that the US was a long way off and, in any case, a sister nation. In those days there may have been no talk of ‘a special relationship’ but the seeds of that relationship were already sown, although there was undoubtedly much rivalry and suspicion. France, although still large in population terms, had failed to grow by anything like as much as Britain either demographically or industrially. Germany, as we know, was clearly rising, and this came to dominate British concerns. Japan was geographically distant and, in times when racism was deeply ingrained, and particularly before the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, was not taken seriously as a threat to the Empire. The only other country which was starting to show that combination of industrial dynamism and population growth which could pose a threat was Russia.
If it takes both industrial weight and population size to become a player on the world stage, Russia in the late nineteenth century was setting out from both a very low and a very high starting point. It was still an overwhelmingly agricultural country, a country of peasants not raised from the level of serfdom until the 1860s; a country with very limited industry and few large towns or cities. The government feared industrialisation and urbanisation, believing, correctly, that these would create revolutionary forces of instability that would threaten the Tsarist regime. On the other hand, to fail to develop, at the very least to build railways and armaments factories, was to consign Russia to defeat on the battlefield, as the Crimean War had demonstrated.
Even without the advantages of industry, however, its enormous numbers were to enable Russia to overwhelm its neighbours to the west, east and south, and to build the world’s largest contiguous political unit, which it remains today. Still, as long as the country remained relatively backward, with the majority of its people illiterate serfs, its population advantage could take it only so far. Thus was posed the question of where Russia was to go. Would Russia stay eternally true to its Orthodox, peasant roots or change, and if so, would it follow the pattern of the West or find its own, special way forward? These are the questions which haunt late nineteenth-century Russian thought and literature, from Herzen to Tolstoy. Perhaps it is no coincidence that in the end, Tolstoy’s heroine Anna Karenina throws herself in front of a train; having abandoned the traditional role of a Russian wife, she ultimately chooses to be destroyed by the mechanical monster which epitomised change. Ultimately, the forces of modernisation, including rapid population growth, proved irresistible. But if Russia’s starting point industrially was very low, its starting point in terms of sheer population size was very high. By the start of the twentieth century, Russia had three times as many people as the UK and rising.19
To grasp the scale of Russia’s population rise, it is really only necessary to understand three pieces of data. First, Russia’s population more than quadrupled in the course of the nineteenth century, accelerating towards the end of it, which meant that as Britain was starting to slow down, Russia was gathering pace. Second, by the time of the outbreak of the First World War, Russia’s population was growing at a full 1.5% per annum, faster than Britain and by then faster too than Germany. At that speed, population almost doubles in a couple of generations. Third, by 1914 Russia’s population was a colossal 132 million, unprecedentedly large for a European country.20 Conditions in Russia were extremely harsh, however, for both industrial workers and even more so for the peasantry. A follower of Tolstoy’s, assisting him in the relief campaign for the famine of 1891, despaired that
with every day the need and misery of the peasants grew. The scenes of starvation were deeply distressing, and it was all the more disturbing to see that amidst all this suffering and death there were sprawling huge estates, beautiful and well-furnished manors, and that the grand old life of the squires, with its jolly hunts and balls, its banquets and its concerts, carried on as usual.21
Yet from a longer-term perspective the misery of the peasants was not growing. Life for ordinary Russians may have been materially miserable and the contrast between rich and poor was certainly stoking the anger which would break out into revolutionary violence, but things were getting better, not worse. Even here the railways were penetrating, new techniques were being adopted to make food more available, and very rudimentary public health was being practised. Plagues were starting to take the lives of fewer people, and bad harvests to become less frequent. From the perspective of today, and even from the perspective of contemporaneous Britain or Germany, Russia seemed a poor and primitive place, yet as long as people prioritise their own lives and the lives of their children, so (as material conditions improve) resources will be focused on preserving life, and in these circumstances improvements in survival rates, death rates and thus population size can be dramatic. In Russia, moreover, family sizes were staying large. Russian women were bearing seven children during the nineteenth
century, with early marriage and many children within marriage very common, and although this was beginning to fall slightly by the time of the First World War, significantly more of the children born were surviving, contributing to the growth of the population.
The Also-Rans of Europe and the Huddled Masses
In the population race, Britain was first off the block, with Germany and Russia close behind. France remained surprisingly still, lingering near the start, whilst the rest of Europe was beginning to stir but lagged far behind.
While some European countries were following Britain’s demographic take-off, others, for much of the nineteenth century, were not. Italy, Spain and Austria-Hungary were still largely mired in the peasant-dominated misery of large family size but high infant mortality. In 1900 in Spain, for example, life expectancy was still under thirty-five while in England it was over forty-eight. Parts of Austria-Hungary did start to see improvement in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and its loss of ground against Britain slowed. This was less so for Spain and Italy. Indeed, it is telling that, at the time of the Spanish Armada, Spain had a population twice the size of Britain’s, while 300 years later it was half the size. Over those years, Britain went from seeing Spain as its most dangerous rival and existential threat to a country barely worthy of strategic attention. Of course, this had much to do with Spain’s loss of empire and internal economic decline, and its failure to modernise and industrialise beyond a few very limited areas, but it also had a lot to do with the relative shifts in the population balance. The Britain of Queen Victoria had much less to fear from Spain than had the England of Queen Elizabeth I, to the point where Spain was seen not as the principal global threat but as no more than a hot, dusty backwater. Population explains much of the reason for this change.
Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire began by the late nineteenth century to send populations beyond Europe, as Britain had been doing for centuries. Had the great cities of America not filled with Sicilian peasants and Jews from the furthest-flung Hapsburg provinces (as well as the Russian Pale) as the twentieth century dawned, the populations left at home would have been larger; in Italy, for example, the death rate fell between 1850 and 1913 from nearly thirty per thousand per year to just over twenty, while the birth rate fell more steadily, so the natural increase between these dates rose from around eight to around thirteen per thousand per annum. Just as the arrival of the railways brought cheaper food and modern ways deeper into the European continent, allowing more children to survive, so they also took more of those children away to the New World, limiting population growth in the Old Country.
Four million Italians emigrated to the US in the thirty-five years before the start of the First World War, and many more left for other places such as Argentina. Emigration from these countries was a boon to the United States, where numbers were swollen by a huge pre-First World War wave of migrants. In the generation after the Statue of Liberty was dedicated in 1886, her torch would welcome fewer immigrants from traditional lands–the British Isles and Germany–and more from the further reaches of Europe. These were people suffering from poverty and (in the case of Jews) persecution at home but who were also experiencing their own population expansions. These huddled masses and their offspring would soon be turned into Americans, providing their new homeland with the population advantage that would propel it to world leadership. Although their fertility rates soon began to fall once they arrived in the New World, they were still high, and so their numbers continued to swell for the first few decades after their arrival. The 6 million Jews of the United States today are overwhelmingly the product of this late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century population movement, as are the 60% of Argentinians who today claim Italian descent.
Although conditions and survival rates for the passage improved over time, and the cost fell, it should not be imagined that even early in the twentieth century the experience for the masses coming from southern and eastern Europe to Ellis Island was pleasant. A US government inspector, sent incognito to report back on conditions for those migrating to the US, reported on her experiences and related that ‘during the twelve days in steerage, I lived in disorder and in surroundings that offended every sense. Only the fresh breezes of the sea overcame the sickening odors.’ Meat and fish reeked and vegetables were a ‘queer, unanalysable mixture’. One boy who left eastern Europe at around this time recalls of the crossing that ‘we were huddled together in steerage literally like cattle’.22
Although the new immigrants were largely expected to assimilate into the predominant culture, they changed America. After the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson warned the British that they should not expect too much familial favour from himself or from his compatriots: ‘You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer rightly be applied to the people of the US.’23
Pride and Panic: Reactions to the Changing Population Balance
In the first years of the twentieth century Britain’s population growth was living on borrowed time. The population had grown rapidly in recent years, so there were many young people having children and fewer old ones dying. That meant that, even if each mother had fewer children, there were still a lot of children born each year to replace the deaths. It was a case of a high birth rate but a falling fertility rate. In time, however, fewer and fewer births per mother would lead to the population size stabilising and then falling. Because the study of population at the time was fairly rudimentary, this was not fully understood and many were complacent. Still, in these years there was in Britain the first evidence of what has come to be called ‘anti-Malthusianism’, or a concern not that the population would be too big (as Malthus had feared) but that it would be too small. In a way, this was not new.
People have often worried about the size of their country’s population particularly in relation to those of rival countries. The French became quite paranoid on the topic after their decisive defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. One commentator early in the life of the French Third Republic complained that ‘the government of France is a committee of bachelors presiding over a country which is depopulating itself’. In Britain, however, this was the first time a country was consciously reacting to a slowdown in its population caused by the processes of modernisation. There was talk of ‘race suicide’, and in 1906 John Taylor, president of the British Gynaecological Society, lamented ‘with supreme dissatisfaction and disgust’ that selfish couples, in employing contraceptives, were countering the patriotic efforts of doctors to preserve life, adding: ‘all this work is swept away as though it had never been by the vicious and unnatural habits of the present generation’.24
British concerns were not just about quantity but also about quality, as is seen in the rise of the eugenicists. During the Boer War, right at the start of the twentieth century, army recruiters had complained about the poor health of working-class boys from the inner cities, with rickets and asthma. There was a worry that in its inner cities, Britain was breeding a race unfit for the military, and the difficulty the Empire had had in defeating the Boers was a wake-up call. At the same time, an ideology some have called ‘Social Darwinism’ was spreading. Inspired by Darwin’s writings a few decades earlier about how animals and species engaged in a constant battle for survival, many intellectuals came to see nations as engaged in such a struggle. They started to worry that not only would there be more Germans, but that they would be fitter and stronger than the boys from the East End of London or the slums of Glasgow. Such thinking was in part behind the setting up of the rudimentary welfare state which came into being in those years, driven by Lloyd George and the young Winston Churchill. Others, influenced by the eugenics movement, preferred to let the least fit go to the wall rather than patch them up. One eugenicist, Dr John Berry Haycraft, praised tuberculosis in his 1895 work Darwinism and Race Progress, commenting: ‘If we st
amp out Infectious Diseases we perpetuate these Poor Types.’25
The slowing growth of the population became a concern of the press. The Daily Mail in 1903 was worrying about the ‘decline of the race’ linked to the slowing birth rate. It believed that victory would belong ‘to the large unit; the full nursery spells national and race predominance’. J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, suggested in 1907 that fertility decline was generally regarded as ‘a sign of decay’. Worries that problems of quantity would be compounded by problems of quality were fuelled by the findings James Barclay published in 1906, suggesting that the better off were breeding less while the poor remained fecund. In the days of Malthus, when life was so much harsher, the better off could afford to keep more of their children alive while the poor lost more, leading to the natural expansion of the better off relative to the poor; given that a relatively static economy could only keep so many people in top places, this inevitably meant that many of those born into the upper echelon had to find for themselves a place lower down the pecking order.
Now this seemed to have reversed, with the better off opting for smaller families while the poor were able to keep more of their children alive.26 In London in 1911 wealthy Hampstead had a birth rate of 17.5 per thousand while that of Shoreditch, in the impoverished East End, was nearly twice as high.27 The importance of the issue of national population in the public consciousness can be seen in the establishment of the National Birth Rate Commission, set up not by any official body but by the National Council for Public Morals whose 1911 manifesto was endorsed by three MPs, the heads of two Cambridge colleges, seven bishops and luminaries such as General William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, Beatrice Webb, pioneering Fabian, and Ramsay MacDonald, a future Labour prime minister. The commission itself was chaired by Bishop Boyd Carpenter and Dean Inge and its vice chairman was Sir John Gorst, previously the Solicitor General. It began its work in 1913 and its results were published in 1916. The Commission concluded that it was not a lack of food and housing but the use of contraception which lay behind declining birth rates. It did not argue explicitly that a declining birth rate meant a decline in national power and prestige and it took some comfort from the evidence that the decline was general across north-western Europe, but the interest it aroused at least suggests the prominence of the topic in the national mind as the nation entered the First World War. While the commission was not official, it was eagerly reported in the press and Prime Minister Asquith stated in the House of Commons that there would be no royal commission into the subject until the National Commission had reported.28