activity with all higher evolution, therefore deliberate birth-control counts for nothing, since exactly the same result follows when voluntary prevention is adopted and when it is not, seems highly absurd. We must at least admit that voluntary birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of supreme importance, because it is within man’s own power and because man is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might otherwise work disastrously. How disastrously is shown by the history of Europe, and in a notable degree France, during the four or five centuries preceding the end of the eighteenth century when various new influences began to operate. During all these centuries there was undoubtedly a very high birth-rate, yet infant mortality, war, famine, insanitation, contagious diseases of many and virulent kinds, tended, as far as we can see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,[1] and so ruinous a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most of the energy which might otherwise have been available for
- ↑ See especially Mathorez, Histoire de la Formation de la Population Francaise, Vol. 1, 1920, Les Étrangers en France. The fecundity of French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris. But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war, emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive fecundity,
