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,[30] and so ruinous a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most of the energy which might otherwise have been available for 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.

[29] The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism in France since the Great War.  That, however, has been an artificial product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States, just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military and Imperialistic caste.

[30] See especially Mathorez, Histoire de la Formation de la Population Francaise, Vol.  I, 1920, Les Etrangers 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, 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 family 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.

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 birth-control, 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.