(Published in Gerarchia, September 9, 1928)
By Benito Mussolini
I do not personally know the author of the book "Decline of Births: Death of Peoples", nor did I ever hear of him until I got a hold of an issue of Süddeutsche Monatshefte (a monthly publication from southern Germany) containing a pamphlet prefaced by Oswald Spengler, which I will soon present to the Italian public and in particular to the Fascist public in an expanded and revised form. Oswald Spengler is known to all scholars who have followed the latest expressions of German political thought and philosophy. His work Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) in its day was the object of lively interest and equally lively polemics.
Dr. Richard Korherr is a Bavarian from Regensburg, of humble origins, who took his university courses in law and sociology at Munich and Erlangen. A young man, born in 1903, he could already aspire to a university chair, but he has renounced it in order to be, as he himself wrote to me, "more free in the struggle he intends to conduct in defense of Western civilization, which is threatened by a complex of false ideas ranging from universal brotherhood to the pursuit happiness, from peace-mongering hedonism to birth control". His book is an episode of this battle. For those who have already meditated upon demographic phenomena in past and present times, the book itself does not provide any special insight. There are a few inaccuracies here and there, at least as far as Italy is concerned, as I will show in a moment. But the book is intended for the general public, who are easy victims of hedonistic prejudices often plagued by false science and, to this end, the book will be of enormous benefit, especially due to its dramatic exposure, its historical references, its references to the contemporary world, and its extensive statistical documentation. His demonstration that the regression of births first affects the power of peoples and then finally leads to their extinction, is indisputable. Even the various phases of this process of illness and death are ahead of schedule and have a name that summarizes them all: urbanism or metropolitanism, as the author says.
Pathological Increase
At a given moment the city grows morbidly, pathologically, not by virtue of itself, but through the contribution of others. The bigger the city becomes and grows into a metropolis, the more infertile it becomes.
The progressive sterility of city dwellers is in direct relation to the rapidly monstrous growth of the city. Berlin, which in a single century passed from 100,000 to more than 4,000,000 inhabitants, is today the most sterile city in the world. It holds the record for the lowest birthrate no longer offset by the decrease in deaths. The metropolis grows by attracting the population of the countryside, which, as soon as it becomes urbanized, becomes barren. It turns the fields into a desert; but when the desert extends its abandoned and burned plagues, the metropolis itself is then taken by the throat: neither its trade, nor its industries, nor its structures of stone and reinforced concrete are able to reestablish the now irreparably broken equilibrium: catastrophe ensues.
The city dies, and the Nation—without the vital lymph fluid of the young of new generations—no longer can resist, composed now of vile, old people. A younger people will press against the abandoned frontiers. That happened. That can still happen. That will happen, and not only among cities and nations, but on an order of magnitude infinitely greater: the entire white race, the Western race, can become submerged by other races of colour which multiply at a rate unknown to ours.
Blacks and yellows are thus at the gates?
Fertile Races
Yes, they are at the gates, and not only because of their birthrates but also because of their race consciousness and their future in the world. Meanwhile, for example, the whites of the United States have a miserable natality rate—it would be even more miserable, if not for the injection of more fertile races, such as the Irish, the Jews and the Italians. The Negroes of the United States are ultra-fertile and already amount to an imposing total of 14 million, that is one-sixth of the population of the Stellar Republic. There is a large quarter of New York, Harlem, which is populated exclusively by blacks. A serious revolt by blacks broke out last July in this quarter; it was a difficult job for the police to suppress it, after a bloody night of conflict, when they found themselves before a compact mass of blacks.
What does it mean for the future history of the West that China has 400 million men concentrated in a single state? And coming closer home, what does it mean for the future peace of Europe that Russia has an extremely high birth rate, so much so that despite wars, epidemics, Bolshevism, famine and mass executions, its total population still reaches almost 140 million souls? The alarm is sounding and all who are able to see beyond daily contingencies (in my opinion, anyone who is unable to see at least fifty years ahead has no right to govern a nation) are worried.
European Situations
In Great Britain, the most industrial and mercantile Nation of Europe, a "return to the countryside" is encouraged by scholars and politicians. But how can we bring some—just some of the many millions of Londoners huddled in the metropolis—back to the countryside? Can we move backwards? The Ministry of Agriculture responds with a pessimistic note. In the last twenty months, plowed land has decreased by another 80 thousand hectares, which means a decrease of more than 200 thousand quintals from the already small wheat harvest estimated at one million and 200 thousand quintals.
Thus London grows, but the English countryside is becoming a desert. It is known that in 1927 England passed France and Germany in regards to minimum birthrate. Even in the beautiful and fertile plains of France the desert tragically gains ground because sterile urbanism—by feeding itself!—has left the villages and farmhouses depopulated and devastated. Here is a real anguishing cry, launched recently by Joseph Barthelemy, a member of the Institute of France:
"We know that there are twice as many foreigners in France today than before the war: they grew from one million in 1911, to two and a half million in 1926; this represents six percent of the total population. For every hundred inhabitants of France, there are six who are not French. It is a staggering proportion. From 1918 to 1926, 853 thousand industrial workers and 600 thousand peasants were brought to France, totaling some 1.5 million individuals. According to our old statistics from 1922, foreigners were already in possession of 333,800 hectares of land, of which 90,500 hectares were owned by them, while they occupied the rest with sharecroppers and farmers. In 1926 Italy provided 18 percent of our labour force. Thus there are not enough Frenchmen to cultivate the land of France. It is a fact. We have more land than we have people. Meanwhile Italy has too many people for its own land. Which one of us is in a better situation? They have youth, vitality and fertility, while we have an elderly people approaching senility. As Mussolini said in 1924: 'Emigration must be considered not as a painful phenomenon of misery and weakness, but as a problem of moral and political strength'."Similar concerns have emerged among Belgian politicians due to the progressive decline of births.
Switzerland too suffers the same disease, with the same fatal effects.
The August 21 edition of Vaterland, the conservative newspaper of Lucerne, sounded the alarm about the declining birthrate in Switzerland:
"The truth—which is clear to anyone who thinks beyond the comfort of living in the moment—is this: Switzerland is prey to a slow process of disintegration and decay. Statistics show that our births, which were 29 for every thousand inhabitants in 1901, fell to 18.2 in 1926, while France in this same year had 18.8 and Italy 27.2.
No doubt about it: we are now below France; nor is it any consolation to see that some other nation has fallen even lower than our average, because those figures too are terrible and painful. They say that we are now at the extreme end, unable to stop it; that we have reached the point where the death sentence of the nation is already written; nor are there any signs of slowing down the process."As can be seen, anxiety is widespread everywhere.
False Theses
This is sufficient to refute all the absurd pseudo-scientific or philosophical vociferations of the Neo-Malthusians. No one today takes the infamous so-called Malthusian Law seriously anymore. One wonders how anyone can still seriously cling to this kind of scientific hoax.
It has been demonstrated that, starting from the existing human population at the time of Malthus, and applying the Malthusian Law backward through the centuries, one would arrive at this astonishing and grotesque conclusion: that at the time of the Roman Empire the earth had no inhabitants!
The idea that quality can replace quantity is a false thesis, a thesis which I vigorously refuted as soon as it was advanced to justify the unfortunately progressive decline in the Italian birthrate. Also false and imbecilic is the thesis that a smaller population means greater well-being: the standard of living of today's 42 million Italians is far above the standard of living of the 27 million in 1871 and the 18 million in 1816.
On the contrary, it is true that those who are well-to-do are the least prolific; it is a fact that the families with the least amount of children are those which have comfortable lives. Thus it is a moral and selfish phenomenon!
The author of the book effectively makes a clean sweep of these and other similar pseudo-scientific falsehoods. The author falls, however, as I mentioned, into some inaccuracies concerning Italy.
If Dr. Korherr travels to Italy, he will realize that:
a) it is not true that countrysides of Piedmont, Lombardy, Tuscany, Romagna and Sicily are particularly in demographic decline;
b) it is not true that the Negroes reach as far as Sicily. On the contrary, the opposite is true. It is the Sicilians who settled in massive numbers in Roman Africa, while in Sicily there are no people of colour except half a dozen Senussi prisoners who are of Semitic origin.
Delicate Situation
But regardless of these details, what is the situation in Italy that Spengler—who praised the early stages of my demographic policy, which can be summarized in these words: maximum births, minimum deaths—discusses?
Until May 1927, when I delivered my speech known simply as the Speech of the Ascension, the Italians were victims of the common myth that there are "too many births". It was time for me to shatter this cliché. The truth is different and is sad; births are declining also in Italy; Italy too suffers from this evil which is common to the other European Nations.
Those who have a sort of optimistic mentality nevertheless observe that the course of the disease in Italy seems benign. This too is a common myth, and in order to shatter it, it will be sufficient to examine the figures in their totality and in their composition.
Let's begin with the totals. The maximum birth rate occurred in the four years from 1881-1885 with 38 births per every thousand inhabitants. Then the slow descent began, and still continues.
The phases of this descent can be seen by everyone in the Tavola del Bollettino dell'Istituto Centrale di Statistica. In 1915, at the time of the war, the birth rate was already at 30.5 per thousand.
In about thirty years we have lost eight points. In the same period the mortality rate fell from 27 to 20 per thousand: therefore it is not even enough to compensate for the diminished birth rate. Then came the war years and 1919, which can not tell us much..
In 1920 the birth rate was 31.8 per thousand, with a mortality rate of 18.8 per thousand: the ratio of surplus births to deaths is 13.1 per thousand. The highest recorded since 1870.
But after this point the regressive movement began, reaching a ratio of 26.9 per thousand in 1927. While it took thirty years to lose eight points before the war, it took only seven years after the war to lose four.
Cities and Countrysides
The decline is not only progressive but accelerates more each year. In the first six months of 1928, the number of births have fallen in absolute terms by more than 11 thousand compared to 1927; with this aggravating fact, there has been a kind of collapse in those provinces of southern Italy that at one time seemed to be—and were—the demographic nursery of the nation. The usual obstinate optimist will observe that the proportional decrease in mortality compensates for the decreased birth rate and that in any case a coefficient of 26.9 per thousand is comforting. So much so that the Italian population increased by 414 thousand inhabitants in 1926, by 457 thousand in 1927; by 239 thousand in the first six months of 1928. I ask the obstinate optimist to follow me as we closely examine the numbers, and I will demonstrate what frightening demographic agony hides beneath the global coefficient of 26.9 per thousand. This coefficient is due exclusively to the offspring of the rural population. All of municipal or urban Italy is in deficit. Not only is there no longer any balance, but the deaths exceed the births. We are at the tragic stage of the phenomenon. The cradles are empty and the graves are widening. All the cities of central and northern Italy face the same deficit. But one city particularly dear to Italian Fascism seems to hold the lamentable record: Bologna.
It will suffice to cite these figures which require no comment: "In a period of 55 years from 1873 to 1927 there were 2658 more live births than deaths, with an annual average of about 48"! (Resto del Carlino, July 31, 1928). Bologna has almost doubled its population over the same period of time, all deriving from the rural population of the province, which, fortunately, is still fruitful. There is nothing more humiliating than reading the daily bulletins of the civil state of Bologna, which almost invariably cite twice as many deaths than births!
Even in the other large neighboring Emilian city, Ferrara, they went from 1312 more births in 1923 to only 731 in 1927: a decrease of 50 percent in four years! The conditions of all the other cities of the Po valley are not faring any better: from Parma to Mantua, to Cremona, to Modena.
In Florence the living barely make up for the dead; thus the natural increase of the population is zero. The other urban centers of Tuscany are in a similar or slightly different situation. In Genoa, in the first four months of 1928, there were 3075 births, but 3338 deaths; thus the population has decreased by as many as 263 people!
In Turin the population has been decreasing regularly for five years now! And Milan? In the supplement to the June 1928 edition of the journal Città di Milano, which references the overall data of 1927, I read these sinister words: "The Milanese birth rate is one of the lowest of the great urban centers, higher only than Berlin and Stockholm."
Has the proud and noble sense of civicism of the Ambrosians thus resigned itself to this mortifying record of decadence and death? Do they therefore want Milan Cathedral to become—as the the Campidoglio was in the Middle Ages—a place of pasture for animals? No. This Milanese would not want that. This Milanese can not possibly want that. There is some hope despite their dark demographic situation. A recovery seems to be occurring. Live births, which were a miserable 295 in the first half of 1926, rose to 728 in the first half of 1927; they increased again to 1148 in the first half of 1928. There is an improving trend: let's report it to the Italian people as a consolation, just as England's Rugby Radio on August 22 announced to the world a very slight improvement in the English demographic situation in the first months of 1928.
The Laws and the Spirit
I do not want to draw hasty conclusions from the small Milanese journal. My demographic policy can not yet bear fruit. But here a question arises: have the demographic laws adopted by the legislators of each country to increase the birth rate had—or can they have—any effectiveness?
This question has been heatedly discussed and we will continue to discuss further. My belief is that even if the laws have proved useless, we must keep trying anyway, just as we try all medicines, especially when the situation is so desperate.
But I believe that the demographic laws—the negative and the positive ones—can halt or in any case delay the phenomenon if the social organism to which they apply is still capable of reaction.
In this case, more than formal laws, it is the hands of the moral custom and, above all, the religious conscience of the individual.
If a man does not feel the joy and pride of being "perpetuated" as an individual, as a family and as a people; if a man does not feel sadness and shame at the prospect of dying as an individual, a family, and a people, then laws in and of themselves can do nothing, even—I would say especially—if they are draconian. Laws must be a spur to morals.
And so my discourse is directed squarely at Fascists and Fascist families. This challenge is the purest touchstone against which the conscience of Fascist generations will be measured. We must determine whether or not the spirit of Fascist Italy is irreparably infected with hedonistic, bourgeois, and Philistine values. The birth rate is not simply an index of the progressive power of the nation; it is not simply as Spengler suggests, 'Italy's only weapon'; it is also that which will distinguish the Fascist people from the other peoples of Europe as an index of vitality and the will to pass on this vitality over the centuries. If we do not succeed in reversing this trend, all that the Fascist revolution has accomplished and will accomplish in the future will be perfectly useless, as at a certain point in time the fields, schools, barracks, ships, and workshops will be empty.
A French writer who dealt with these problems said: "In order to speak about national problems, it is necessary, first of all, for the Nation to exist".
Now a Nation exists not only as history or territory, but as human masses that reproduce themselves from generation to generation. To do otherwise means servitude or extinction. Italian Fascists: Hegel, the philosopher of the State, said: "He who is not a father is not a man!"
In a reclaimed, cultivated, irrigated, disciplined and therefore Fascist Italy, there are places and bread for another ten million men. Sixty million Italians will make the weight of their mass and their strength felt in world history.
