The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization

by Patrick J. Buchanan

In Caesar and Christ, Book III of his Story of Civilization, historian Will Durant argues that “biological factors” were “fundamental” to the fall of the Roman Empire: A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian … . A law of Septimus Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men. In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time [250 A.D.] been halved. He mourned to see “the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.” Only the barbarians and Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.50 How did Rome reduce its population? “Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished … . Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect.”51 Adds Durant: “Perhaps the operation of contraception, abortion and infanticide … had a dysgenic as well as a numerical effect. The ablest men married latest, bred least and died soonest.”52 Christians were having children, the pagans were not: “Abortion and infanticide, which were decimating pagan society, were forbidden to Christians as the equivalents to murder; in many instances Christians rescued exposed infants, baptized them, and brought them up with the aid of the community fund.”