h-rate to fall with the growth of social
stability is thus a tendency which is of the very essence of
civilization. It represents an impulse which, however deliberate it may
be in the individual, may, in the community, be looked upon as an
instinctive effort to gain more complete control of the conditions of
life, and to grapple more efficiently with the problems of misery and
disease and death. It is not only, as is sometimes supposed, during the
past century that the phenomena may be studied. We have a remarkable
example some centuries earlier, an example which very clearly
illustrates the real nature of the phenomena. The city of Geneva,
perhaps first of European cities, began to register its births, deaths,
and marriages from the middle of the sixteenth century. This alone
indicates a high degree of civilization; and at that time, and for some
succeeding centuries, Geneva was undoubtedly a very highly civilized
city. Its inhabitants really were the "elect," morally and
intellectually, of French Protestantism. In many respects it was a model
city, as Gray noted when he reached it in the course of his travels in
the middle of the eighteenth century. These registers of Geneva show, in
a most illuminating manner, how extreme fertility at the outset,
gradually gave place, as civilization progressed, to a very low
fertility, with fewer and later marriages, a very low death-rate, and a
state of general well-being in which the births barely replaced the
deaths.

After Protestant Geneva had lost her pioneering place in civilization,
it was in France, the land which above all others may in modern times
claim to represent the social aspects of civilization, that the same
tendency most conspicuously appeared. But all Europe, as well as all the
English-speaking lands outside Europe, is now following the lead of
France. In a paper read before the Paris Society of Anthropology a few
years ago, Emile Macquart showed clearly, by a series of ingenious
diagrams, that whereas, fifty years ago, the condition of the birth-rate
in France diverged widely from that prevailing in the other chief
countries of Europe, the other countries are now rapidly following in
the same road along which France has for a century been proceeding
slowly, and are constantly coming closer to her, England closest of all.
In the past, proposals have from time to time been made in France to
interfere with the progress of this downward movement of the
birth-rate-