is to be brought about.  The oldest methods are deliberate neglect and infanticide.  In China, where authorities differ as to the extent to which female infants are exposed, the practice certainly prevails of feeding infants whom their mothers are unable to suckle on rice and water, which soon terminates their existence.  Such methods would happily find no advocates in Europe.  The very ancient art of procuring miscarriage is a criminal act in most civilised countries, but it is practised to an appalling extent.  Hirsch, who quotes his authorities, estimates that 2,000,000 births are so prevented annually in the United States, 400,000 in Germany, 50,000 in Paris, and 19,000 in Lyons.  In our own country it is exceedingly common in the northern towns, and attempts are now being made to prohibit the sale of certain preparations of lead which are used for this purpose.  Alike on grounds of public health and of morality, it is most desirable that this mischievous practice should be checked.  Its great prevalence in the United States is to be attributed mainly to the drastic legislation in that country against the sale and use of preventives, to which many persons take objection on moral or aesthetic grounds, but which is surely on an entirely different level from the destruction of life that has already begun.  The ‘Comstock’ legislation in America has done unmixed harm.  It is worse than useless to try to put down by law a practice which a very large number of people believes to be innocent, and which must be left to the taste and conscience of the individual.  To the present writer it seems a pis aller which high-minded married persons should avoid if they can practise self-restraint.  Whatever injures the feeling of ‘sanctification and honour’ with which St. Paul bids us to regard these intimacies of life, whatever tends to profane or degrade the sacraments of wedded love, is so far an evil.  But this is emphatically a matter in which every man and woman must judge for themselves, and must refrain from judging others.

In every modern civilised country population is restricted partly by the deliberate postponement of marriage.  In many cases this does no harm whatever; but in many others it gravely diminishes the happiness of young people, and may even cause minor disturbances of health.  Moreover, it would not be so widely adopted but for the tolerance, on the part of society, of the ‘great social evil,’ the opprobrium of our civilisation.  In spite of the failure hitherto of priests, moralists, and legislators to root it out, and in spite of the acceptance of it as inevitable by the majority of Continental opinion, I believe that this abomination will not long be tolerated by the conscience of the free and progressive nations.  It is notorious that the whole body of women deeply resents the wrong and contumely done by it to their sex, and that, if democracy is to be a reality, the immolation of a considerable section of women drawn from the poorer