an
increase in the population, that plea entirely failed because the
desired effect would not thus be produced. A special effort ought now
to be made on eugenic as well as on other grounds to maintain the high
standards of home life which had ever existed in our race, and which
had been in large measure the basis of our social and racial progress
in the past. If we did not now take some steps to insure our own
racial progress being at least as rapid as that of our neighbours, and
if our nation should in consequence cease in future to play a great
part in the noble and eternal struggle for human advancement, then the
fault would be ours.

The English Word, Thought, and Life

By Russian Men of Letters

A group of sixty-seven Russian writers and publicists,
comprising the best men of letters of the nation, with the
exception of Vladimir Korolenko, who is at present in
France, have signed a reply to the tribute to the writers of
Russia by English men of letters, a translation of which was
printed in CURRENT HISTORY for February, 1915. The text of
the reply, given below, is taken from the Moscow daily
newspaper, Outro Rossii; its translation into English by Leo
Pasvolsky appeared in the New York Evening Post of June
20th.

We have known you for a long time. We have known you since we Russians
came to a communion with Western Europe and began to draw from the
great spiritual treasury created by our brethren of Western Europe.

From generation to generation we have watched intently the life of
England, and have stored away in our minds and our hearts everything
brilliant, peculiar, and individual, that has impressed itself upon
the English word, the English thought, and the English life.

We have always wondered at the breadth and the manifoldness of the
English soul, in whose literature one finds, side by side, Milton and
Swift, Scott and Shelley, Shakespeare and Byron. We have always been
amazed by the incessant and constantly growing power of civic life in
England; we have always known that the English people was the first
among the peoples of the world to enter upon a struggle for civic
rights, and that nowhere does the word _freedom_ ring so proud and so
triumphant as it does in England.

With wonder and veneration, have we watched the English people, that
combines the greatest idealism with the most marvellous creative
genius, that constantly transforms