The declining birth-rate / Herbert Thurston.

  • Herbert Thurston
Date:
1921
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The declining birth-rate / Herbert Thurston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    less in amount than at Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford, and other such towns? Miss Elderton does not hesitate to admit that “the Irish element is the source of the unique position of Liverpool” in comparison with other Lancashire cities,t but she accompanies her encomium with a lament that. ‘its population appears to be inferior in skill and intelli- gence to nearly all the towns wherein the birth-rate is rapidly declining.” It strikes us as an almost _ solitary weak point in Miss Elderton’s monograph that she seems to take it for granted that destitution and. thriftlessness in the parents of necessity imply unfitness in the offspring. No doubt taking. our slum population as a whole the rule is a fairly safe one to follow, but speaking upon information fur- nished by those who have an intimate acquaintance with the children of the Irish substratum in Liver- pool, we emphatically hold that these particular guttersnipes cannot be in any way regarded as “unfit.” The level of natural intelligence is excep- tionally high, and it is not among them that we. find the largest proportion of those that are rickety, malformed, and mentally deficient. Miss Elderton carries her unfavourable estimate so far that she throws out the suggestion, though with hesitation, that the high birth-rate among the Irish of Liverpool may be due more to the fact that ‘ they have been too ignorant to learn methods of limiting their families,” than to the teaching of the Church that all such practices are sinful. “Catholicism,” she
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