ral degeneration. Its birthrate fell from 30.8 in 1821 to 26.2 in
1851, 25.4 in 1871, 22.1 in 1891, 20.6 in 1901, and to 19 in 1914. The
result was inevitable. In the race of empire France fell slowly back.
The alien had to be imported to cultivate her own fair fields. She
annexed territories, but she could {6} not colonise them. The prophets
who prophesied doom have been abundantly justified. To-day France,
risen from the dead, is wrestling for her life; she is impotent to
drive back the foe without the help of Britain and Russia--she who
dominated Europe a century ago! When we read of a Russian army, after
a journey round half the world, landing at Marseilles to take their
place in the trenches that Paris may be saved from the devastators of
Belgium and Poland, we see the fields ripe for the harvest of that
policy which sacrificed the race to the individual. The hope for
France is that she will rise from the grave of her degeneration,
new-born.

What has happened in France is what happened in Rome long before. It
was not because of the inrush of barbaric hosts that Rome perished, but
because Rome sacrificed its children. In its golden age, when luxury
clouded the heart, Rome began to avoid the responsibilities of family
life, and so sounded the death-knell of its empire. Here is ever the
source of human {7} decay. The most perfect intellectual and aesthetic
civilisation ever developed on earth was that of the ancient Greeks.
'We know and may guess something more of the reason why this
marvellously gifted race declined,' says Francis Galton. 'Social
morality grew exceedingly lax, marriage became unfashionable and was
avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed
courtesans and consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming
population were of a heterogeneous class.' And the misery which lay so
heavily on the heart of Hosea was that Israel was rushing to
destruction because children ceased to be born. National
licentiousness produced a diminishing population. 'And there are no
more births,' cries the prophet beholding the coming doom. Over us the
skies are darkening with the portents of the same doom. For we also
have given ourselves to the same degeneration. To Puritanic Scotland,
a generation ago, France was oft quoted as a solemn {8} warning of the
depths to which atheism and materialism bring a nation. To-day
Scotland as a whole is only four points behind France i