The Human Tide

by Paul Morland

  The sons of Japheth… have increased and multiplied; they have progressed beyond belief… Looking to the north, the east and the west, the horizon is unlimited… Only in the south appears a little cloud… This is the direction in which to double the guard.30

  Voices as optimistic as East’s were harder to find among Europeans who remained in Europe. The ratio of whites to blacks in the United States was of little consequence to British administrators worrying about how to defend Australia from the threat of Japanese incursion, or from the perspective of French military planners observing a still growing gap between the generational sizes on either side of the Rhine, or indeed from the perspective of the German military planners watching the still faster growth of Russia’s population. While the Americans could afford the luxury of a global view, Europeans, at least those of Western Europe, had to concern themselves with the ongoing viability of their extra-European empires and, as before the First World War, their perceived demographic weaknesses relative to that of their continental neighbours.

  The British, while continuing to worry about the situation at home, were to some extent comforted by the falls in population growth across the North Sea. On the other hand, they now began to worry about demographic trends in the colonies. Seventy-seven million people in Japan shared 261 thousand square miles, while a white population in Australia just 7% of the size of Japan’s enjoyed an area more than ten times larger.31 It was in the light of such growing awareness of the demographic weight of Asia that the White Australia policy developed, excluding Asians from Australia, just as they had been excluded in the late nineteenth century from the USA. Fear of Asians in Australia can certainly be dated to the pre-First World War period and was particularly strong on the political left. William Hughes, Labor Party leader and later prime minister, had written in 1896 that on

  our northern border we have a breeding ground for coloured Asiatics, where they will soon be eating the heart’s blood out of the white population, where they will multiply and pass over our border in a mighty Niagara, sowing seeds of diseases which will never be eradicated, and which will permanently undermine the constitutional vigour of which the Anglo-Saxon race is so proud.32

  Legislation was passed in Australia, as in New Zealand and the United States, to exclude non-European and particularly Asian immigration, and as the Second World War approached G. F. McCleary, denying that this amounted to a ‘dog in the manger attitude’ on the part of the white Australian, stated resolutely: ‘He [the white Australian] means to make full use of his manger, but to use it in his own way–to people his country without racial admixture, conflict and disaster.’33 Concern was not expressed about the demographic fate of Canada, which had also passed legislation against Asian immigration, for no non-European elements were deemed to be lurking there. In contrast, Australia posed a particular worry because of its proximity to what French academic Étienne Dennery had referred to as ‘Asia’s teeming millions’. His book Asia’s Teeming Millions and its Problems for the West had been published in English in 1931, and in a section entitled ‘The Expansion of China’, Dennery noted that there were a total of 8 million Chinese outside the country and over 400 million at home (he was perhaps making a deliberately provocative reference to Seeley’s 1883 book The Expansion of England, just as the French writer Henri Andrillon had done in 1914 with The Expansion of Germany). He also noted the expansion of Indian emigration to east Africa, to the Caribbean and to south-east Asia, insisting ‘there is a real danger for Western nations and the future peace of the world in these hapless masses of Asia, cramped on the narrow confines of their tiny rice field or their little strips of land’.34 Talk of the ‘Yellow Peril’, which had started before the First World War, was now more resonant. It was pointed out, for example, that Asian immigration of 100,000 a year into Britain’s antipodean colonies would do little to relieve the overcrowding of Asia but ‘would demoralise everything in Australia and New Zealand’; it was essential that the ethnic homogeneity of the colonies be retained.35

  Unsurprisingly, while Europeans may have worried about Australia’s ethnic demography, Australians themselves were even more concerned. The legislation they brought in had, in the first instance, been driven by a labour movement with economic reasons for keeping out cheap workers, but motives became increasingly racial. Indeed, the legislation was somewhat watered down, at least in its presentation, under pressure from Britain not to give offence to the Asian powers and in particular to preserve good relations with Japan.36

  The adventure novelist and agricultural reformer Henry Rider Haggard also worried about the demographic fate of the colonies. His contribution to the topic is to be found in an edited volume on the subject of controlled parenthood to which Marie Stopes also contributed. On the one hand, Haggard argued, Australia and Canada were wide and open, and if they were not peopled by those of British origin, they would ultimately be lost. On the other hand, the mother country was overcrowded and should not be populated beyond its ability to feed itself in a crisis. The answer had to lie in continued emigration to the colonies; without such a flow, the colonies would decline or fall into foreign hands. Inflows of people from other countries could not be relied on, as they would eventually ‘water away [the]… original blood’ until the Anglo-Saxon character of the Dominions was lost.37 Haggard’s own mixed Jewish and Indian ancestry did not seem to prevent him sharing the general opinion of the time on both sides of the Atlantic, that the Anglo-Saxon was the finest specimen nature had ever created.

  British concern for the Dominions and particularly for Australia can be seen as a specifically national worry that the pre-war demographic weaknesses of the UK were now being manifested in its colonial offspring. Nevertheless, now that the threat was deemed to come from non-Europeans as well as from Europeans, the language was specifically racial, even more so than it had been before the war, when the worry had been more about German than Japanese cradles. It was noted that the annual increase in population in Australia had fallen from over 2% per annum to 1.5%, and in New Zealand from just under 2% to 1.25%.38 Before 1914 British commentators had been worrying about British decline in relation to the rest of Europe; now they also worried about general European decline in relation to the rest of the world. Indeed, they saw an analogy between the two: just as Britain would have been imperilled during the Great War with a smaller population, so now its population weakness threatened the empire; as Haggard put it: ‘Where, for instance, should we have been and where would our Allies have been if, during the late war, Great Britain had possessed half her present population?’ Likewise, the empire might be imperilled for lack of people: ‘Sixty million persons of our blood are not too many to rule over some three hundred and seventy millions of native peoples.’39

  McCleary, writing in 1938, compared the birth rates of England and Wales, France, Italy and Germany in the early 1880s with those of the mid 1930s, and found that they had fallen by 56%, 37%, 39% and 52% respectively. It was the absolute numbers rather than the growth in numbers in areas further to the east which were alarming. Haggard spoke of Russia’s supposed 180 million people and the devastation they might wreak ‘if directed and organised by German skill and courage and aided by other sinister influences’,40 and as late as 1945 (and as yet unabashed by the discrediting of racial language through its association with the Nazis) McCleary published a work entitled Race Suicide? in which he saw the problem of falling European fertility as being not so much a symptom of the ‘biological decadence of nations’ as it was of excessive individualism and what he called ‘the cult of self-development’.41

  In Britain there continued to be an intra-European as well as a colonial aspect to population concerns, with the latter sometimes expressed in terms of ‘the white race’, which somewhat contradicted the worries closer to home. It was not always clear whether the falling birth rate in Germany, the low birth rate in France and the first signs of reductions in Russia were to be greeted as a reduction in the menace posed by Europ
ean rivals or regretted as part of a general white decline. So far as Asian peoples were concerned, the Chinese and Indians represented ‘teeming millions’ while the Japanese represented a special threat since they had shown how rapidly Asians might adopt European practices and both expand their populations further and deploy European military technology and organisation against the Europeans. Sir Leo Chiozza Money, an Anglo-Italian, one-time parliamentary secretary to Prime Minister Lloyd George and a government minister, feared ‘the possibility of Europe perishing through the employment by the coloured races of its own scientific methods’. He noted that the birth rates of other European countries were falling fast. Japan added 700,000 people a year as against a quarter of a million in England and Wales. From this he drew the explicitly pan-European conclusion that it ‘is suicidal to encourage racial scorns, racial suspicions, racial hatred among the small minority that stand for White Civilisation’.42 Such pan-European sentiments were not general enough, however, to prevent a second European conflagration.

  The French, meanwhile, continued to fret about their demographic weakness even if the gap between their birth rate and that of Germany had diminished. In the years immediately before the First World War, great tomes had been published with titles such as La Dépopulation de la France and Patriotisme et paternité, the latter pointing out and indeed warning that in 1907 France had only 286,183 conscripts compared with 539,344 in Germany the following year.43 This theme was continued after the war with works like La question de la population by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, which argued, perhaps not very persuasively, that the key problem of France’s weak population situation was not so much military or economic, important though these factors were, but ultimately moral.44 This was, in a sense, a precursor of McCleary’s worry about excessive individuality, a premonition, perhaps, of the ‘second demographic transition’ which was, half a century later, to see fertility rates across much of Europe plunge far lower than anything experienced in the interwar years.

  It is not by chance that France turned out to be by far the most welcoming place to immigration in Europe between the wars, with nearly a million coming from Italy, over half a million from Poland and over 300,000 from over the border in Belgium. Although hardly free from racial prejudice, the Enlightenment and revolutionary traditions of France tended to a universalism which accepted that anyone–or at least anyone white–could in time become French. France was particularly keen to encourage immigration of the ‘right sort of stock’, ideally Latin in culture and language, Catholic in background and easy to assimilate into French society–for which purpose, as well as to boost the birth rate, the Alliance Nationale pour l’Accroissement de la Population Française (National Alliance for French Population Growth) was established.45 The Alliance can be seen as an early case of combining ‘hard demographic engineering’ with ‘soft demographic engineering’, an attempt to shore up weak population numbers through first encouraging immigration and then encouraging a shift in identity to the prevailing host culture.46 With a more flexible attitude to the relationship between ethnicity and nationality, what might be called civic nationalism, France was able to bolster its numbers in ways which were not open to its more ethnocentric neighbour across the Rhine, particularly after 1933.47

  Immigration and integration were only part of the French demographic armoury; the other arm was pro-natalism, which was given a boost by the civic society La Plus Grande Famille. Long obsessed by demography, the French were more willing than other democracies actively to promote the birth rate. Significantly, even though La Plus Grande Famille was founded in 1915 and one might have expected it to have been more fearful of populations over the Rhine than over the Mediterranean, its founder put its mission in racial terms: ‘If the white race restrains its birth, who will guarantee that the yellow race will follow? Who will assure us that the black race will sacrifice its fecundity which, to cite one example, is a cause of anxiety for whites in the United States?’48 And so birth control and abortion were highly restricted in interwar France, while motherhood was promoted by benefits and medals.49

  Demography and the Dictators

  After the First World War there was a retreat in classic liberalism. The ideal of the minimal state and the predominance of the individual lost currency. Classic liberalism had passed its zenith in the face of growing state intervention even in the UK in the later decades of the nineteenth century, but the process accelerated during the Great War as the state’s involvement in the economy became necessary for the war effort. As a result, the notion that the state should adopt demographic goals and implement policies to advance them became more widely accepted. This was true of the democracies but even more so of the dictatorships that were spawned between the wars. Although generally pursuing the goal of large populations for the sake of prestige and power, dictators did not necessarily follow their goals consistently or rationally. After all, the practice of wholesale murder, whether committed by Communists or Nazis, is hardly consistent with the professed aim of increased population growth. Yet while killing people with impunity, dictators were generally keen to see their numbers replaced by births, either by a new generation whose views could be suitably moulded (Communists) or by those who fitted the right ethnic, racial or national criteria (Fascists and Nazis).

  The Soviet attitude to population underwent a change that is perhaps best mirrored in their attitude to art. Just as the early years of the revolution adopted an artistic policy that favoured experimentalism and what might be called a revolutionary spirit, so attitudes to family and reproduction were what today might be called ‘progressive’. Marx and particularly Engels had, after all, condemned the family as a facet of capitalism and marriage as little more than a socially recognised form of prostitution. Over time, however, more conservative forces kicked in, and just as the Party preferred the conformity of ‘socialist realism’ in art, so it came to adopt more conventional attitudes to the family. The tensions were there from the beginning: Alexandra Kollontai, the most senior Bolshevik woman at the time of the revolution, opined that ‘the sexual act should be recognised as neither shameful nor sinful, but natural and legal, as much a manifestation of a healthy organism as the quenching of hunger or thirst’.50 Lenin disagreed.

  The Soviet state was the first in the world to legalise abortion, but contraception remained generally unavailable and unused in part because of its expense (even in the more prosperous West it was still largely the preserve of the middle classes). At this stage in the life of the Soviet state, abortion was justified on the grounds of personal choice and women’s welfare. As one worker from a factory staffed mostly by women reported months before the legalisation: ‘Within the past six months among 100–150 young people under age 25, I have seen 15–20% of them making [sic] abortions without a doctor’s help. They simply use household products: They drink bleach and other poisonous mixtures.’51 The abortion legalisation decree stated:

  For the past ten years, the number of women having abortions has been growing… The legislation of all countries struggles against this evil by… punishing women who opt for abortion and the doctors who perform it… It drives the operation underground and makes women the victims of greedy and often ignorant abortionists.52

  The predominantly peasant population still had a high fertility rate, but this was beginning to fall as more of the population was urbanised and became literate. Under Stalin, social revolutionary attitudes waned and the Soviet Union was faced with a dilemma: there was a need for female labour in the fields and, increasingly, factories, but also a desire to ensure a large population for the strength of the state. There was also a growing distaste for abortions which, in some cities, surpassed the number of births.53 In 1935 Stalin declared ‘man the most precious resource’ and the following year abortion was outlawed in all but exceptional circumstances. As usual, the more junior officials parroted the new party line. Aaron Soltz, an Old Bolshevik and sometimes referred to as the conscience of the Party, insisted that in the
new ‘Socialist Reality’, abortion was no longer required: ‘Our life becomes more gay, more happy, rich and satisfactory. But the appetite, as they say, comes with the meal. Our demands grow from day to day. We need new fighters… We need people.’ He talked of ‘the greatest happiness of motherhood’. Others compared mothers to Stakhanovite workers and justified punishment for abortion on the grounds of the need to ‘protect the health of women’ and ‘safeguard the rearing of a strong and healthy younger generation’.54 Yet despite the newly minted pro-natalism of its Communist leadership, Russia’s fertility rate continued to fall. The human tide could not even be held back by Stalin ‘the Great Architect’, and it turned out it was easier to determine the output of steel or tractors than of children. Nevertheless, the Soviet Union’s population continued to rise sharply thanks to the fact that, although falling, fertility was high and, despite the famine and purges, life expectancy for the population as a whole continued to lengthen, while emigration was largely forbidden.