bominable crime." The paucity of children in
the families of wealthy and well-to-do Americans has been publicly
noticed and commented upon time and again; but the true cause thereof,
if known, was carefully concealed. And can we wonder that the crime has
descended from the highest to the lowest, and now pervades all classes
of society? Statistics have been frequently published to show that in
certain States of the Union, and in certain districts of those States,
the births did not, and do not, equal the deaths; and were it not for
the foreign population among us many of those districts, and not a few
of those States, would be depopulated in a few years. Massachusetts and
New York lead the van in this criminal record. Dr. T. A. Reamy, of
Zanesville, Ohio, in 1867, wrote, that after a careful survey of the
field he was ready to say that "to-day no sin approaches with such
stealth and dangerous power the altars of the Church as foeticide;
and, unless it can be stayed, not only will it work its legitimate moral
depravity and social ruin, but (he believed) God will visit dreadful
judgment upon us no less severe, perhaps, than He did upon the Cities of
the Plain."

In 1865, Dr. Morse Stewart, of Detroit, Michigan, declared that few of
either sex entered the marital relation without full information as to
the ways and means of destroying the legitimate results of matrimony.
And among married persons so extensive has this practice become, that
people of high repute not only commit this crime, but do not even blush
to speak boastingly among their intimates of the deed, and the means of
accomplishing it.

Dr. Nathan Allen, of Lowell, Mass., at a meeting of the Social Science
Association, Boston, entitled "Wanted--More Mothers," remarked "that the
increase of population for twenty-five years has been mainly in cities
and towns, and it will be found to be largely made up of foreign
element; and in the smaller villages, chiefly American, the stock has
hardly increased at all.

"We find there are absolutely more deaths than births among the strictly
American children; so that, aside from immigration, and births of
children of foreign parentage, the population of Massachusetts is really
decreasing.

"Another fact developed by report is, that whereas, in 1765, nearly
one-half of the population of Massachusetts was under fifteen years of
age, it is believed that, at the _present_ time, _not_ more than
_one-fifth_ of the purely Amer