THE CAUSES OF THE DECLINING BIRTH RATE 179 
all married couples rather than to keep it under the ban of legal 
prohibition. There is a considerable amount of sincere moral 
feeling, and a larger amount of purely hypocritical protest against 
such a procedure.! The question cannot be decided by ecclesias- 
tical authority, or by any sort of @ priori deduction, but only on 
the ground of what is most conducive to the welfare of the race. 
What we need is a judicious combination of the preachments of 
Dr. Drysdale and Mr. Roosevelt,—family limitation where such 
is needed, and greater fecundity among those whose inheritance 
is of superior quality. 
' Mr. H. Giachte has somewhat ironically pointed out that among the members of 
the National Committee on the Increase of the Population in France, there were 
only 578 children to 445 members, or an average of one and a third children per 
family! 
On the pros and cons of birth control the reader may be referred, in addition 
to the books and periodicals mentioned above, to Beale’s Racial Decay, a rather 
rambling, disorganized work, strongly condemnatory of birth control. This work 
formed the occasion of Mr. Roosevelt’s famous article on Race Suicide (Outlook, 
Vol. 97, p. 763) which should be read by everyone interested in the subject. Of 
purely historical interest is Knowlton’s, Fruits of Philosophy (a rather sorry pro- 
duction by the way) whose republication in England in 1878 brought about the 
celebrated trial of Chas. Bradlaugh and Mrs. Annie Besant. Mention may also be 
made of Mrs. Besant’s pamphlet, The Law of Population, which ran through many 
editions amounting in all to several hundred thousand copies. A strong attack on 
birth restriction is contained in the Rev. R. Ussher’s, Neo-Malthusianism (Methuen 
and Co., London, 1897). On the Neo-Malthusian side attention may be called to 
Uncontrolled Breeding, by A. More; Small or Large Families, by C. V. Drysdale, 
H. Ellis, W. J. Robinson and A. Grotjahn; W. J. Robinson’s books, Eugenics, 
Marriage and Birth Control, Fewer and Better Babies, The Limitation of Offspring; 
A. Grotjahn’s, Geburtenriickgang und Geburtenregelung (Marcus, Berlin, 1914). H. 
Ellis has discussed the subject in his Task of Social Hygiene, Essays in War Time, 
and in the Eugenics Review for 1917. An interesting series of articles by M. A. 
Hopkins runs through Harper’s Weekly for 1915. A useful bibliography of several 
hundred references has been compiled by Th. Schroeder (H. W. Wilson Co., N. Y., 
1918, 35 cents). 
