to practise a medical rite may be inexpedient, in spite of the virtues of the rite itself.  That is not all.  Sir Henry Maine will admit that Mr. Herbert Spencer is not against science, and he expresses in the present volume his admiration for Mr. Spencer’s work on Man and the State.  Mr. Spencer is the resolute opponent of compulsory vaccination, and a resolute denier, moreover, of the pretension that the evidence for the advantages of vaccination takes such account of the ulterior effects in the system as to amount to a scientific demonstration.  Therefore, if science demands compulsory vaccination, democracy in rejecting the demand, and even if it went further, is at least kept in countenance by some of those who are of the very household of science.  The illustration is hardly impressive enough for the proposition that it supports.

Another and a far more momentous illustration occurs on another page (37).  A very little consideration is enough to show that it will by no means bear Sir Henry Maine’s construction.  “There is, in fact,” he says, “just enough evidence to show that even now there is a marked antagonism between democratic opinion and scientific truth as applied to human societies.  The central seat in all Political Economy was from the first occupied by the theory of Population.  This theory ... has become the central truth of biological science.  Yet it is evidently disliked by the multitude and those whom the multitude permits to lead it.”

Sir Henry Maine goes on to say that it has long been intensely unpopular in France, and this, I confess, is a surprise to me.  It has usually been supposed that a prudential limitation of families is rooted in the minds and habits of nearly, though not quite, all classes of the French nation.  An excellent work on France, written by a sound English observer seven or eight years ago, chances to be lying before me at the moment, and here is a passage taken almost at random.  “The opinions of thoughtful men seem to tend towards the wish to introduce into France some of that improvidence which allows English people to bring large families into the world without first securing the means of keeping them, and which has peopled the continent of North America and the Australian colonies with an English-speaking race” (Richardson’s Corn and Cattle Producing Districts of France, p. 47, etc.).  Surely this is a well-established fact.  It is possible that denunciations of Malthus may occasionally be found both in Clerical and Socialistic prints, but then there are reasons for that.  It can hardly be made much of a charge against French democracy that it tolerates unscientific opinion, so long as it cultivates scientific practice.