By Benito Mussolini
When in the now distant 1926, in one of my speeches, I launched the first cry of alarm about the demographic decline of the White race, a decline which also very strongly affects the Italian Nation, some people considered my warning to be untimely or exaggerated. Eight years have now passed, and the fatal decline has continued, indeed it has gotten even worse, and now there are cries of alarm arising in all parts of the world.
In Hungary, the custom of having only one-child per family is now deplored by its leaders; in the Republic of Argentina—ten times larger than Italy and where 80 to 100 million men could comfortably live—the birth rate is a massacre; the birth rate is so low, in fact, it is expected that after 1939 there will be a demographic arrest and the current population will remain at twelve million. Eminently dramatic is the appeal that twenty notable French politicians, scientists and artists have addressed to the people, to warn them about the destiny that awaits them. The manifesto says:
"The number of births has decreased in France by forty thousand units from 1932 to 1933; it fell to 682,000, while before 1870 it exceeded one million. In the near future there will also be a considerable decrease in the number of marriages, an unavoidable consequence of our past denatality, especially during wartime. For this reason alone will soon have a decrease of over 80,000 births per year. Furthermore, if the fertility of young French couples continues to decline according to the average pace of the last six years, it is mathematically certain that France will have no more than 550,000 births in ten years.
The number of deaths will then be far superior to the number of births. Depopulation has already impoverished numerous departments, where villages are perishing and farms are falling into ruin. Allowing the declining birthrate to accentuate and extend to our whole territory means accepting that the French people will become an elderly people and means condemning France to a progressive weakening. As a result of depopulation, agriculture, trade and industry will increasingly decline due to lack of consumers. The State will become insolvent due to lack of taxpayers, and the country will be unable to defend its borders against other younger nations due to lack of defenders.
These dangers are not distant, but imminent, and the current generations are the ones who are threatened by the falling birth rate...The manifesto bears the signatures of two former presidents of the Republic, namely Poincaré and Millerand, as well as Herriot, Cardinal Verdier, Marshal Foch and other great personalities.
There is no time to waste or run for cover. Other nations have shown us the way: Germany and Italy, despite still having birth surpluses of 250,000 and 400,000 per year respectively, have already committed themselves to an energetic fight against the declining birth rate. Other measures of a moral and material nature that Germany and Italy have adopted have proved effective: at the present time, the number of their births is increasing.
France must follow their example, otherwise it will perish."
In turn, this appeal was followed by a publication of the National Alliance, advocating the increase of the French population:
"The number of births in France has fallen by a third in the last 50 years. There were 1,034,000 births in 1868 and 722,000 in 1932. Today the fall precipitates. If this pace continues, there will be less than 500,000 births within ten years. France will lose 150,000-200,000 inhabitants each year. The aging of the population is a very serious problem. France already has the highest proportion of old people of any other nation (14%, compared to 9% in Germany and 7% in Russia). Now, the reduction in mortality can not compensate for the birth rate. France today counts 38 million French just as in 1870, but their distribution is no longer the same. There are many more elderly and far fewer children. Germany on the other hand regurgitates children and Italy has 4 million more children than France."The practical consequences of French nationality were then reviewed. According to the National Alliance, French denatality was the fundamental cause of the 1914 war, because they made Germany believe that France was a dying nation. Finally, the publication points out the disastrous consequences of denatality, from an economic point of view, since it tends to reduce the number of consumers, as well as from a financial point of view, and finally from a social point of view. But the importance of it lies in the observation that the ten million French people born between 1870 and 1914 had created that fatal imbalance between the two population masses on both sides of the Rhine—a demographic imbalance and therefore a military imbalance—which [according to their own words], in order to fix, it was necessary to have a war and spill the blood of almost all the peoples of the earth.
When looking at Great Britain, the demographic decline truly begins to disturb the spirits. It is difficult to preserve an empire when the metropolis is old and dying.
It seems that Malthus is no longer fashionable. After all, Malthus himself did not really believe too much in his own unreasonable and catastrophic forecasts, and this is shown by the fact that he had 14 children. History demonstrates how demographic decline affects Nations. Polybius tells us how the Greek cities were sterile and empty and therefore easy prey for the Roman conquerors; but also Rome itself was plunged into catastrophe when, due to its decline in births, it had to resort to mercenary troops. There was a time in which, in order to have men tall enough for the imperial guard, they had to resort to using the Batavi (Dutch) who were conquered by Julius Caesar.
The saddest aspect of the phenomenon is the aging of the population. While in many departments of France schools are closed due to lack of schoolchildren and in other departments schools are attended mostly by foreign children (Italians, Poles, Spaniards), the financial burden for aged humanity increases every year: these are Nations where a fifty year old is an adolescent. If the phenomenon does not turn around, we can foresee a France that towards the end of the century will have a population lower than the current Spanish population. And there are European states where the birth rate is even lower than the French one. That the decline of births has no relation to the economic situation is demonstrated by the universal fact that wealth and sterility go hand in hand, while the more modest classes of the population are also the most fertile, that is to say, those who still have a sense of morality and have not massacred the divine purpose of life for the sake of cerebral selfishness.
Moreover, the last century has completely disproved Malthus' theories that the increase in population would lead to starvation due to insufficient food supplies. The world can support a population twenty times greater than the current one. The resources of the United States of America are sufficient to maintain a population five times that of today. Canada can give life to a number twenty times greater than today's inhabitants. Vast areas of South America are still almost completely untouched; there are still others in Africa, in Australia, even in Europe, and certainly also in Asia.
The crisis we are currently facing is not a crisis of famine, as everyone now knows; on the contrary, it is precisely a crisis of overabundance due in part—as I mentioned in my speech to the Italian Chamber on May 26th—to the decrease of population in the big industrial countries.
What is even more depressing is that the so-called intellectual elements of the various nations are not prolific. They are content with one or two children, and that's if they decide to have any at all. If we look at the statistics of graduates in the various large universities and scientific institutes, we realize that, in proportion to their considerable number, the intellectuals do not understand that to a certain extent they are responsible for giving the nation new elements that can elevate its intellectual level.
This is the situation. As for the measures to be adopted, and above all the results of them, we have been quibbling for centuries: even today there are those who, for example, still argue about the effectiveness of the laws promulgated by Augustus. In one of my speeches I said that even before this terrible, delicate and mysterious phenomenon, the worst policy is the liberal one of "laissez-faire". No government has ever practiced this. Today, many governments have a demographic policy. In Italy we have had one since 1926. It is too early to judge the results. However, for Italy—as well as for other countries inhabited by people of the White race—it is a matter of life or death.
It is a matter of knowing whether the civilization of the white man is destined to perish in the face of the growing number of yellow and black races.
