social progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit more easily than the unfit.
Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and deliberate practice of birthcontrol, whether we advocate that policy on the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.
Along this road, as along any other road, we
so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about twenty-two millions. Then the size of the fainily fell in Paris to 3.9 and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages. Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.
