ex_, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," p. 590). A
Catholic bishop is reported to have warned his clergy against referring
in their Lent sermons to the voluntary restriction of conception,
remarking that an excess of rigour in this matter would cause the Church
to lose half her flock. The fall in the birth-rate is as marked in
Catholic as in Protestant countries; the Catholic communities in which
this is not the case are few, and placed in exceptional circumstances.
It must be remembered, moreover, that the Church enjoins celibacy on its
clergy, and that celibacy is practically a Malthusian method. It is not
easy while preaching practical Malthusianism to the clergy to spend much
fervour in preaching against practical Neo-Malthusianism to the laity.

[116] McLean, "The Declining Birth-rate in Australia," _International
Medical Journal of Australasia_, 1904.

[117] Thus in France the low birth-rate is associated with a high
infantile death-rate, which has not yet been appreciably influenced by
the movement of puericulture in France. In England also, at the end of
the last century, the declining birth-rate was accompanied by a rising
infantile death-rate, which is now, however, declining under the
influence of greater care of child-life.

[118] Sidney Webb, _Times_, October 11 and 16, 1906; also _Popular Science
Monthly_, 1906, p. 526.

[119] It is important to remember the distinction between "fecundity" and
"fertility." A woman who has one child has proved that she is fecund,
but has not proved that she is fertile. A woman with six children has
proved that she is not only fecund but fertile.

[120] They have been worked out by C.J. Lewis and J. Norman Lewis,
_Natality and Fecundity_, 1905.

[121] Newsholme and Stevenson, _op. cit._; Rubin and Westergaard,
_Statistik der Ehen_, 1890, p. 95.

[122] D. Heron, "On the Relation of Fertility in Man to Social Status,"
_Drapers' Company Research Memoirs_, No. 1, 1906.

[123] The recognition of this relationship must not be regarded as an
attempt unduly to narrow down the causation of changes in the
birth-rate. The great complexity of the causes influencing the
birth-rate is now fairly well recognized, and has, for instance, been
pointed out by Goldscheid, _Hoeherentwicklung und Menschenoekonomie_, Vol.
I, 1911.

[124] In a paper read at the Brunswick Meeting of the German
Anthropological Society (_Correspondenzblatt_ of the Society, November,
1898); a great many