by Paul Morland
In an age when snobbery was as unapologetic as racism, this led some to claim that the quality of the nation would inevitably decline, with the higher echelons of society dying out and the masses breeding so that the best and brightest ‘blood’ (today the term used would be ‘genes’) was pushed out by that of inferior quality. At that time it was not only a question of class but also of race, it seemed. In 1906 The Lancet reported the work of Sydney Webb, later Lord Passfield and a founding member of the Fabian movement and Labour Party, deploring the loss of ‘one fifth part of every year’s “normal” crop of babies’ and decrying it as ‘a national calamity seriously threatening the future welfare of our race’. The problem was not only an overall drop in numbers but also ethnic composition; Webb lamented that half the people were limiting their families while children were being ‘freely born’ to Irish Catholics and immigrant Jews.29
Not all voices expressed concern at the decline of the birth rate and consequent slowdown in growth of the population. Some, such as the Malthusian liberal economist and MP John Mackinnon Robertson, deplored the ‘rhetoric about decay of national energy, the approaching extinction of the Anglo-Saxon, the fall in the vitality of the higher races, and the rest of it’. Dissenting voices welcomed the fact that smaller family sizes would allow for improved welfare and were themselves a sign of social advance. Smaller families would allow parents to take greater care of their children and allow them to be better nourished.30
Concern in Britain at falling population growth was not just about what was going on in the country itself but was also fuelled by a growing sense of rivalry with Germany. Germany was seen not just as a rival or potential rival in its economic dynamism and growing international trade, nor just in its quest for colonies and a navy, but also in its population growth. Population was fundamental to the challenge Germany posed to Britain. A one-time citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Emil Reich, published a book in 1907 with the title Germany’s Swelled Head, a book that was republished in 1914. It suggested that the Germans were looking forward to having 104 million people by 1964, 150 million by 1980 and 200 million by the year 2000. Apparently, Reich’s book was read keenly by Edward VII, a British monarch generally known for his antipathy towards Germany and in particular towards his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II. The king recommended it to leaders of the army and, among others, the Bishop of Durham.31
It was not only the British who worried about German population growth (along with more general British worries about German economic and naval rivalry). The French, with their own demography much weaker than Britain’s and well behind Germany’s, had been fretting about birth and conscription rates since at least 1871, following the Franco-Prussian War, the loss of Alsace-Lorraine and the subsequent unification of Germany. Indeed, worries about French demographic decline can be dated back to the start of the nineteenth century if not earlier still. And although it was clear by the time the First World War broke out that German population growth was slowing and that in 1910 only 800,000 had been added to the population rather than the 850,000 of five years earlier,32 nevertheless it was feared that this might be a merely temporary pause, that Germans would always have larger families and that by 1950 the German population would reach 95 million. Most alarmingly of all, it was feared that the population growth of Germany would provide it with a leading edge on the battlefield for at least half a century to come.33
With their own burgeoning population, Americans could hardly feel that they compared poorly to Germany from a demographic perspective. In addition, from the American point of view, there was no direct threat of German population and military power being translated into an invading army such as France or even Britain feared. American concerns, rather, hinged on the large population of Germans living in the United States. These fears were worked on by those militating for a pro-Allied stance during the war and who were concerned to put America on its guard against what in later years would be called ‘fifth columnists’. One such doomsayer, Howard Pitcher Okie, in his luridly entitled America and the German Peril, pointed out in 1915 that there were precisely 1,337,775 German-born males in the US according to the 1910 census, that 40% of them were aged between twenty and forty (and therefore, he supposed, had probably done German military service) and as many as 10 million people in America were either German-born or had two German-born parents. Okie went on to note that there were twice as many German males in New York alone as in the entire standing US Army.34
German perceptions of their population growth were less clear-cut. They may have been boasting about it, at least according to Emil Reich (although perhaps never to the same extent as the hubristic Anglo-Saxon visions of world domination discussed in the previous chapter). Paul Rohrbach, a writer and publicist of Baltic extraction and an advocate of German world power, suggested that Germany’s population growth should be interpreted as a sign of its ‘natural and moral strength’.35 On the other hand, as in the UK, there was awareness that the lower orders were outbreeding their betters in the years before the First World War and, again as in the UK, this was understood against a background of social Darwinism and a eugenicist outlook. Ferdinand Goldstein, a social commentator warning against the over-population of Germany, feared that ‘the proles will capture the world’ leading to ‘the triumph of mediocrity as in France today’. In addition, while Germany’s population was growing faster than Britain’s, it was growing more slowly than Russia’s, and this in turn was giving rise to German fears.36
Just as the British and even more so the French looked eastward and worried about Germany’s population, so the Germans looked eastward and worried about the population of Russia. This can be seen in the writings of German academics and journalists of the time, people now long forgotten but influential in their day, who helped to create an atmosphere of rivalry and xenophobia which accompanied the approach of the First World War and in part caused it. While Ferdinand Goldstein was fretting that the wrong sort of Germans were too fertile and the right sort insufficiently so, he was also worried that ‘the only real danger is the mindless breeding of the Slavs’. Friedrich Lönne, writing in 1917, argued that the slowdown of Germany’s demographic growth would lead to military and economic eclipse, that ‘nations whose population continues to grow will usurp our place in the world economy’, and that Germany ‘will lose her place in the sun’.37 There were various efforts to legislate before the war against the spreading of methods of contraception, most such efforts being unsuccessful and in any case motivated as much by concern for public morals, and spearheaded by the Catholic Centre Party, as at that stage by any real concern for German military or economic power. Later, after the war was over, Hans Albrecht feared that ‘in the final analysis, all the disarmament clauses of the Versailles Diktat will not be as fateful as the fact that Germany will simply not have enough men to bear arms’.
The seeming inexhaustibility of Russia’s population growth was a real worry to German commentators, just as French commentators seemed to think that fecundity and Germanness were somehow inextricably linked. Influential voices such as those of the historian Friedrich Meinecke fretted publicly about Russia’s inexorable rise, with burgeoning population, industry and military capacity contributing decisively towards Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s ‘now or never’ decision for war in 1914. Bethmann’s secretary Kurt Riezler records his boss as talking a few years before the outbreak of war of ‘Russia’s increasing claims and immense explosive force’ which would ‘No longer to be resisted in a few years’.38
Not only was there a widening gap between the population growth of the early adopters of demographic transition and those who experienced it later, in favour of the latter; this fact was now being noticed, commented on and worried about. And this worry contributed to and was part of the general atmosphere of inter-state rivalry and tension which marked the international environment and marred international relations in the years leading to the First World War.
Two qualifying points must
be made, however. First, demography was only part of the concern; there was more worry in Britain about being out-manufactured and out-traded by Germany than there was about being out-bred and out-manned. While the Germans were extremely concerned about Russia’s military build-up, the population growth which accompanied it, although recognised, was in itself not the main concern; it was something which might cause problems in the future, whereas commercial rivalry was causing problems at the time and so was a more immediate worry. The second qualification is that population worries were not only focused on the question of international competition; there were still Malthusians, by now perhaps neo-Malthusians, who thought that a growing population was a problem and others, both in Britain and in Germany, who were more concerned about the domestic implications of how the growth was made up (too much breeding among the lower orders) than they were about the overall size or international implications.
Combining concerns about national population that were both quantitative and qualitative (the latter driven by racism and eugenics), the Fascists, who emerged after the First World War, would lay the foundations of the Second. Nevertheless, the factor of population amid pre-war international tensions was real and inextricable from other aspects of rivalry, and significant differences in rates of population growth were noted and reacted to in important ways.
How the Cradles Rocked the World
Without doubt, population in the main countries of Europe in the decades leading to the First World War and the way they were perceived contributed to the first catastrophe of the twentieth century. But what about the impact of population on the outcome of the war itself? There are two aspects to the answer. The first has to do with economics, industry and productive capacity; the second to do with the ability to place armies in the battlefield.
If the sheer growth in numbers was clearly one of the essential conditions to Britain becoming the workshop of the world, and thrust it to the forefront of the world’s economy, then the population growth of its rivals had at least the potential to have the same effect for them. On the one hand China, with its hundreds of millions, remained an economic backwater in the absence of significant industrial development. On the other hand, the countries of Scandinavia and what would be termed ‘Benelux’ remained economic minnows because, although they developed industrially and economically, they were simply too small in population terms to have much impact. For an economy to matter, it must have a relatively large population and that overall population must be prosperous or becoming prosperous.
Looking at Britain in the years 1820–70, it is possible to attribute about half its annual economic growth (around 2.5% per annum on average) to the growth of the population and about half to the population’s growing wealth. After 1870 Germany’s economy and particularly its industry began growing much faster than Britain’s so that, for example, by 1914 Germany was producing half as much pig iron again as Britain where, in 1870, it had produced barely a quarter of the British total. On the eve of the First World War, Germany was producing twice as much steel as Britain.39 This came to matter when the young men of the two nations were hurling metal at each other. Without the great population explosion Germany had experienced it could never have become the industrial and economic giant capable of taking on Britain and its allies.
Just as population growth underpinned the economic and industrial rise of Germany, so likewise it was essential to the rise of Russia. From 1885 to 1913 Russia’s economy grew by a startling 3.4% per annum on average, faster than Germany’s although from a much lower base. Again, this was partly because of the population growth and partly because each Russian employed was producing and consuming more. Russia was able to send 750,000 people to Siberia in a single year, underwriting its claims to the vast and sparsely populated territory.40 Industrial production in Russia trebled in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and industrial employment in the first thirteen years of the twentieth century grew by nearly 50%.41 This was replicated in armaments production in Russia, which doubled in the five years to 1913.
By the outbreak of war in 1914, Russia was still well behind Germany or even France in its output and prosperity, but it had rapidly closed the gap in the preceding years. The burgeoning population as well as mass urbanisation were essential components of this. When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, claiming to represent the industrial working class in line with Marx’s theory, it was frequently pointed out that the industrial working class in Russia represented a tiny share of what was still very largely a peasant society; not that much earlier, there was simply no industrial working class to talk of at all. When war came in 1914, Russian industry struggled to maintain the supply of armaments to its troops but still it kept them fighting for over three years. Without the breakneck industrialisation of the previous decades, intimately connected to the growing population, even this would not have been achievable. Meanwhile, the war boosted demand for industrial labour, bolstering the potentially revolutionary proletarian class. And it also disrupted the movement of food from countryside to town or city, making it hard to feed the urban population.42 This young, uprooted and underfed population was ripe for revolution.
But if the link between population growth and economic and industrial growth came to matter in times of war, even more directly linked are population growth and the sheer weight of military force, particularly in arenas such as the First World War where, more than by any great stroke of strategic genius, battles were fought by a sheer grinding process of attrition, each side trying to wear the other down. Outside the confines of Europe, small numbers of men representing the European imperial powers were able to control large populations whose societies and economies were much less advanced. Even within Europe, the tightly organised and disciplined German troops had some advantage over their French and British enemies, at least initially, and a considerable advantage over the Russian soldiers. Yet for all of this, numbers were supremely important. The ability to recruit and keep recruiting men and pouring them into the battlefields, particularly in the static trench warfare on the Western Front, proved crucial, as did the ability to keep providing men at the front line with the products of an industrial economic base, a base which was in considerable degree linked to demography.
Britain was in a unique position as a naval power, although it was only as the First World War progressed that it managed to recruit and then conscript an army of scale. Britain’s naval power, not highly dependent on large-scale manpower, kept the sea lanes open for the Allies, allowing resources and men to arrive from beyond Europe. Those extra-European men and resources were largely possible only because emigration had been fuelled by Britain’s earlier population growth. As the French Army struggled under the weight of persistent German assault and Germany’s greater ability to put men into the field, the contribution of British manpower, both in the factory and at the front, proved critical in allowing the Allies to hold out in the west.
Naturally, no precise mathematical weight can be given to the relevance of population in the outcome of the First World War. It was without doubt a testimony to German industry, courage and organisation that Germany came so close to winning. Yet in the end, where advanced industrial powers came face to face, numbers told, and numbers were decisively in favour of the Allies, who managed to mobilise nearly 46 million men in the course of the war compared with fewer than 27 million raised by the Central Powers. Excluding the United States, which was only beginning to make the impact of its manpower felt by the time the war ended in November 1918, the ratio of the men mobilised on either side over the course of the conflict (1.75 to 1 in favour of the Allies) was almost exactly the same as the ratio of the populations of the principal powers at the outbreak of war (1.73 to 1 in favour of the Allies).43 The cradles of the 1880s and 1890s had proved decisive. If the population of Britain was being overshadowed by that of Germany, then Britain had won by calling into play the still larger battalions of Russia and the vast forces of its imperial offspring, the D
ominions, and ultimately of that imperial daughter, the United States of America. The balance of forces which played out and determined the outcome of 1918 hinged critically on the demographic developments we have been charting. Beyond the particular balance of forces, the very nature of the war was shaped not only by mass industrialisation but also by mass armies the likes of which the world had never seen before; and neither of these phenomena would have been possible without the population explosion of the preceding years.
Population affected not only the outcome of the war, but also its causes. Population growth meant that Europe’s societies, particularly Germany’s and Russia’s, were young. These countries experienced what would now be called a ‘youth bulge’, which has been associated with aggression and war. Politically and diplomatically, meanwhile, Britain feared an ever-rising and growing Germany, Germans feared an ever-rising and growing Russia, and this drove both, it could be argued, to rashness in July 1914. Without the sense of challenge (felt by Britain with regard to Germany) and doom (felt by Germany with regard to Russia), cooler heads might have prevailed that summer.