[Footnote 26:  “Seventh Annual Report of Registrar-General.”]

[Footnote 27:  Healthy Districts Life Table, by Dr. Farr. Phil Trans.  Royal Society, 1859.]

(C) The comparison we seek is between the total families produced by an equal number of urban and rural women who had survived the age of 24.  Many of these women will not marry at all; I postpone that consideration to the next paragraph.  Many of the rest will die before they reach the age of 40, and more of them will die in the town than in the country.  It appears from data furnished by the above-mentioned tables, that if 100 women of the age of 24 had annually been added to a population, the number of those so added, living between the ages of 24 and 40 (an interval of seventeen years) would be 1539 under the conditions of life in Manchester, and 1585 under those of the healthy districts.  Therefore the small factors to be applied respectively to the two cases, on account of this correction, are 1539/(17 x 100) and 1585/(17 x 100).

(D) I have no trustworthy data for the relative prevalence of celibacy in town and country.  All that I have learned from the census returns is, that when searching them for the 1000 families, 131 bachelors were noted between the ages of 24 and 40, among the factory hands, and 144 among the agricultural labourers.  If these figures be accepted as correct guides to the amount of celibacy among the women, it would follow that I must be considered to have discussed the cases of 1131 factory, and 1144 agricultural women, when dealing with those of 1000 mothers in either class.  Consequently that the respective corrections to be applied, are given by the factors 1000/1131 and 1000/1141 or 88.4/1000 and 87.6/ 1000.  This difference of less than 1 per cent, is hardly worth applying, moreover I do not like to apply it, because it seems to me erroneous and to act in the wrong direction, inasmuch as unmarried women can obtain employment more readily in the town than in the country, and celibacy is therefore more likely to be common in the former than in the latter.

(E) The possible difference in the length of an urban and rural generation must not be forgotten.  We, however, have reason to believe that the correction on this ground will be insignificant, because the length of a generation is found to be constant under very different circumstances of race, and therefore we should expect it to be equally constant in the same race under different conditions; such as it is, it would probably tell against the towns.

Let us now sum up the results.  The corrections are not to be applied for (D) and (E), so we have only to regard (A) x (B) x (C), that this—­

2681 x 74/100 x 1539/1700   1796   77
------------------------- = ---- = --
2911 x 86/100 x 1585/1700   2334   100

In other words, the rate of supply in towns to the next adult generation is only 77 per cent., or, say, three-quarters of that in the country.  This decay, if it continued constant, would lead to the result that the representatives of the townsmen would be less than half as numerous as those of the country folk after one century, and only about one fifth as numerous after two centuries, the proportions being 45/100 and 21/100 respectively.