ds, tended, as far as we can
see, to keep the population almost or quite stationary,[30] and so ruinous
a method of maintaining a stationary population necessarily used up most
of the energy which might otherwise have been available for social
progress, although the stationary population, even thus maintained, still
placed France at the head of European civilisation. The more firmly we
believe that the diminution of the population is a natural process, the
more strenuously, surely, we ought to guide it, so that it shall work
without friction, and, so far as possible, tend to eliminate the
undesirable stocks of man and preserve the desirable. Clearly, the theory
itself calls for much effort, since it is obvious that along natural lines
the decline, if it is the result of high evolution, will affect the fit
more easily than the unfit.

[29] The reader may point to the renewal of Militarism and Imperialism
in France since the Great War. That, however, has been an artificial
product (in so far as it exists among the people themselves) directly
fostered from outside by the policy of England and the United States,
just as the same spirit in Germany before the war, in the face of a
falling birth-rate, was artificially fostered from above by a military
and Imperialistic caste.

[30] See especially Mathorez, _Histoire de la Formation de la Population
Francaise_, Vol. I, 1920, _Les Etrangers en France_. The fecundity of
French families, even among the aristocracy, till towards the end of the
eighteenth century, was fabulous; in the third quarter of the
seventeenth century the average number of children was five in Paris.
But the mortality was extremely high; under the age of sixteen, Mathorez
estimates, it was 51 per cent., and infant mortality was terrible in all
classes, small-pox being specially fatal. Then there were the various
diseases termed plagues, with famine sometimes added, while war,
emigration, and religious celibacy all counteracted the excessive
fecundity, so that from the thirteenth century to the third quarter of
the eighteenth the population seems to have been stationary, about
twenty-two millions. Then the size of the family fell in Paris to 3.9
and in France generally to 4.3, while also there were fewer marriages.
Therewith there was an increase of prosperity.

Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to
quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all
classes