A Stationary Population
There can be no doubt that our population. like that of France, is becoming stationary at about 40.000,000. Last quarter the birth-rate in England and Wales declined to 15.3 per 1,000, the lowest yet recorded in the first quarter of a year. As the death-rate, usually high in the early months, was 15.4 per 1,000. the deaths actually exceeded the births, as they have occasionally done before. The death-rate can hardly be expected to decline much further, now that the proportion of aged persons in the population is much larger than it used to be. Infant mortality, now reduced to 87 per 1,000 live births, may be lessened by the provision of better homes and fuller medical attention. But the birth-rate, falling through the past ten years, has probably not reached its minimum. This vast and silent change in the population must influence national policy in many ways, but it will on the whole simplify the tasks ahead of us.
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