Fewer Dead, Fewer Born

Leaving to others the interpretation of causes, the U. S. Bureau of Census last week observed that the mortality rate has declined in 85 large cities below the rate of last year--from 135 per 10,000 to 124 per 10,000. Surgeon General Hugh Smith Gumming of the U. S. Public Health Service, when he noted this downward drift in the statistics last year, indicated to President Hoover that it was due to frugality and temperance in Depression.

While the death rate has fallen, so has the birth rate. Assumption that this too is due to Depression is a reasonable one, wrote P. K. Whelpton in the American Journal of Sociology last week. Mr. Whelpton, who reported for the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems, recorded 2,450,000 births in the U. S. for last year, a slump of 17% from 1921, 10%, from 1926. This decline in births, joined with the decline in deaths, thinks he, "should have important economic and social effects. . . . The market has been expanding most rapidly for things used primarily by elders and will continue to do so for some decades. . . . There has been an actual contraction in size of market for things used by infants and young children, with indications of further contractions or a stationary condition in the future. . . . School facilities and teaching staffs will be affected. . . ."

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