said or written to add to or take away from the truth and force
of these great principles, but, that the moral restraint of Malthus has
been practised to an extent, and in a direction of which the great
economist never dreamt. By moral restraint in the limitation of families
Malthus meant only delayed marriage. In so far as men and women
abstained from, or delayed their marriage, on the ground of inability to
support a family, they fulfilled the law, and followed the advice of
Malthus. Continence without the marriage bond was assumed; incontinence
was classed with another check vice.

Contrary to the expectations arising out of the famous progressions,
wealth and production have increased and the birth-rate has decreased.
It is the purpose of this work to show what are the causes that have led
to this decline, that those causes are not equally operative through all
classes of the people, and that the chief cause of the decline of the
birth-rate is the desire on the part of both sexes to limit the number
they have to support and educate. The considerations that lead up to,
and, to some extent, justify this desire, will be discussed later.

The fact remains that an increasingly large number of people have come
to the conclusion that the burden and responsibility of family
obligations limit their enjoyments in life, their ambition, and even
their scope for usefulness, and have discovered, through the spread of
physiological information, means by which marriage may be entered upon
without necessarily incurring these responsibilities and limitations.

It is the knowledge of these physiological laws and the practice of
rules arising out of that knowledge, that account for the declining
birth-rate of civilized nations.

If it be true that the birth-rate is controlled by a voluntary effort on
the part of married people to limit their families, and that that effort
implies self restraint and self denial, it would not be too much to
claim that those most capable of exercising self-control and with the
strongest motives for such exercise, are those most responsible for the
declining birth-rate, and that those with least self-control and the
fewest motives for exercising the control they have, are most likely to
have the normal number of children.

It has already been suggested, that the desire to limit families is due
to a consciousness of responsibility on the part of prospective
parents. They realise the stress of competiti