The average annual birth-rate is about 35 per 1000, and the death-rate about 15.5 About 26% of the births are illegitimate.
Although economic motives have become more complex, they have just as much and no more to do with general economic reasoning and analysis than the causes of death with the normal expectation of life, or domestic ideals with the birth-rate.
During 1897 the death-rate for the whole province rose to sixty-nine per thousand, or double the average, while the birth-rate fell to twenty-seven per thousand.
In 1900 the birth-rate was 26.90 per thousand, 7.8% of the births being illegitimate; the deathrate was 19.40 per thousand, and the marriage-rate 10 per thousand.
Others had withdrawn into the mountains and forests, and in the native villages under Spanish administration the birth rate had dropped to a small part of what it had been because the great bulk of the male population had been segregated in the mines and on the estates of the conquerors.
