of population in Europe and America. 153 
years of the five by a noted statistician, Dr. Shurtleff, there 
were recorded in Massachusetts 2,976 still births and 5,899 pre- 
mature births and abortions, the ratio being 1 abortion to ‘5 still 
births ; in other words, the frequency of abortions as compared 
with still births at the full time is at least 8 times as great in 
Massachusetts as in the worst statistics of the city of New York.* 
It is allowed by political economists, by Mill and by Malthus 
himself, that so much of the existing decrease as cannot other- 
wise be explained, must be attributed to influences generally 
prevalent in Europe during earlier ages, and in Asia to the 
sigan time. ‘Throughout Europe,” says Mill, “these causes 
ave much diminished, but they have nowhere ceased to exist.”+ 
Several of these causes, starvation, wars, disea been 
se, have 
named by the authority now quoted, but the greatest of them 
all is left unspoken. 
The wilful destruction of living children, at and before birth, 
history declares to have obtained, and to a very great extent, 
among all the earlier nations of the world, the Jews alone ex- 
cepted. Aristotlet defends it, and Plato.§ It is mentioned by 
Ale ages, and still prevails among the Mahometans, Chinese, Jap- 
a 
They are wholly inexplicable on any principles which do not 
recognize an amount of guilt at which humanity shudders. 
e have seen that with us, in the absence of all influences 
that tend to keep down population in foreign countries, old and 
crowded, and under the yoke of despotism, the effects attributa- 
ble elsewhere to these causes, exist and to an exlreme degree. 
That the ratio of foetal deaths to the population had swelled in 
New York from 1 in 1633 in 1805 to 1 in 340 in 1849, while in 
France at a later period, 1851, they were only 1 in 1000. That the 
actual number of foetal deaths in that city had in the 7 years from 
1850-57, very nearly doubled. That the foetal deaths as_com- 
pared with the total of births, elsewhere in statistics of illegit- 
imacy alone, where the results are supposed worst and con- 
fessed chiefly from crime, being 1 in 16°8 (Belgium), had bere, 
* The abo ks are not to be misunderstood. In Massachusetts registration 
has been ‘Cobaiotted ike iodine endive ecees: Subsecieinl investigations tions 
have proved that both infanticide and equal | man; 
ther of our states, 
t Loe. cit., i, 417. t Travels of Anacharsis, v, 270. 
iv, 842. | Satires, vi, 592. 
S| Amor, lib. 2; Heroides, epist.2.  ** Reeve’s Apologies. 
