extremely profligate leave few offspring. The poorest classes crowd
into towns, and it has been proved by Dr. Stark from the statistics of
ten years in Scotland (21. Tenth Annual Report of Births, Deaths,
etc., in Scotland, 1867, p. xxix.), that at all ages the death-rate is
higher in towns than in rural districts, and during the first five
years of life the town death-rate is almost exactly double that of the
rural districts. As these returns include both the rich and the poor,
no doubt more than twice the number of births would be requisite to
keep up the number of the very poor inhabitants in the towns,
relatively to those in the country. With women, marriage at too early
an age is highly injurious; for it has been found in France that,
Twice as many wives under twenty die in the year, as died out of the
same number of the unmarried. The mortality, also, of husbands under
twenty is excessively high (22. These quotations are taken from our
highest authority on such questions, namely, Dr. Farr, in his paper On
the Influence of Marriage on the Mortality of the French People, read
before the Nat. Assoc. for the Promotion of Social Science, 1858.), but
what the cause of this may be, seems doubtful. Lastly, if the men who
prudently delay marrying until they can bring up their families in
comfort, were to select, as they often do, women in the prime of life,
the rate of increase in the better class would be only slightly
lessened.
It was established from an enormous body of statistics, taken during
1853, that the unmarried men throughout France, between the ages of
twenty and eighty, die in a much larger proportion than the married:
for instance, out of every 1000 unmarried men, between the ages of
twenty and thirty, 11.3 annually died, whilst of the married, only 6.5
died. (23. Dr. Farr, ibid. The quotations given below are extracted
from the same striking paper.) A similar law was proved to hold good,
during the years 1863 and 1864, with the entire population above the
age of twenty in Scotland: for instance, out of every 1000 unmarried
men, between the ages of twenty and thirty, 14.97 annually died, whilst
of the married only 7.24 died, that is less than half. (24. I have
taken the mean of the quinquennial means, given in The Tenth Annual
Report of Births, Deaths, etc., in Scotland, 1867. The quotation from
Dr. Stark is copied from an article in the Daily News, Oct. 17, 1868,
which Dr. Farr considers very carefully written.) Dr. Stark remarks on
this, Bachelorhood is more destructive to life than the most
unwholesome trades, or than residence in an unwholesome house or
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