University of Virginia Library

I. Population

In 1870, Germany had a population of about 40 million. By 1892 this figure had risen to 50 million, and by 30 June 1914 to about 68 million. In the years immediately preceding the war the annual increase was about 850,000, of whom an insignificant proportion emigrated. [1] This great increase was only rendered possible by a far-reaching transformation of the economic structure of the country. From being agricultural and mainly self-supporting, Germany transformed herself into a vast and complicated industrial machine dependent for its working on the equipoise of many factors outside Germany as well as within. Only by operating this machine, continuously and at full blast, could she find occupation at home for her increasing population and the means of purchasing their subsistence from abroad. The German machine was like a top which to maintain its equilibrium must progress ever faster and faster.

In the Austro-Hungarian empire, which grew from about 40 million in 1890 to at least 50 million at the outbreak of war, the same tendency was present in a less degree, the annual excess of births over deaths being about half a million, out of which, however, there was an annual emigration of some quarter of a million persons.

To understand the present situation, we must apprehend with vividness what an extraordinary centre of population the development of the Germanic system had enabled Central Europe to become. Before the war the population of Germany and Austria-Hungary together not only substantially exceeded that of the United States, but was about equal to that of the whole of North America. In these numbers, situated within a compact territory, lay the military strength of the Central Powers. But these same numbers -- for even the war has not appreciably diminished them [2]--if deprived of the means of life, remain a hardly less danger to European order.

European Russia increased her population in a degree even greater than Germany -- from less than 100 million in 1890 to about 150 million at the outbreak of war; [3] and in the years immediately preceding 1914 the excess of births over deaths in Russia as a whole was at the prodigious rate of two million per annum. This inordinate growth in the population of Russia, which has not been widely noticed in England, has been nevertheless one of the most significant facts of recent years.

The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists. Thus the extraordinary occurrences of the past two years in Russia, that vast upheaval of society, which has overturned what seemed most stable -- religion, the basis of property, the ownership of land, as well as forms of government and the hierarchy of classes -- may owe more to the deep influences of expanding numbers than to Lenin or to Nicholas; and the disruptive powers of excessive national fecundity may have played a greater part in bursting the bonds of convention than either the power of ideas or the errors of autocracy.