That forced abortion is steadily on the increase, and that prevention of conception keeps pace with it, is proven by the fact that our native-bom Americans, among whom the terrible practice appears most prevalent, are all noted for small families;1 and that among this class, as is amply shown by statistics, there are absolutely in many places more deaths than births, the native-born population of Massachusetts and New York actually decreasing every year.1 A clergyman of New York writes—"we could prove that in our little village of a thousand people prominent women have been guilty of this crime of murder. Sadder still half of them are members of Christ's Church; and while fully fifteen per cent, of our women habitually practise this deadly sin, there is a much larger percentage who endorse and defend it." Few of either sex nowadays enter into the marriage relation without being fully informed of every method and means of obviating the undesirable results of matrimony; and it is no uncommon thing to find women making these the subject of social afternoon conversations among themselves.

3 A recent bulletin, issued by the U. S, Census Bureau, and prepared by Prof. W. F. Wilcox, of Cornell University, places this matter in a startling and official light. Summarizing hia conclusions, in I860, the number of children, under five years of age, to 1000 women was as fifteen to forty; at nine years of age it was 634 to the thousand. la 1900. it was only 474. In other words the proportion of children to potential mothers in 1000 whs only three-fourths as large as in I860, showing a very material decline in the birth-rate. The unusual decline shown for the period 1860-1870 is of course accounted for. at least in part, by the Civil War; but the unsatisfactory index of the birth-rate since 1S70 points very unmistakably to the causes we are at present considering. In 1900, a comparison of the proportion of children born of native and foreign mothers shows 460 for the former, and 710 for the latter, per 1000 women of a child-bearing age; the lowest native ratio of births being in the District of Columbia and in Massachusetts, the highest in North Dakota and the Indian Territory. Outside of the fact that the country exhibits a superior fecundity to the city in the table quoted, the foregoing statistics tend to show very unmistakably the pernicious influence of so-culled civilization in restricting the birth-rate, and the deplorable prospect of this country were this birth-rate not kept up by the superior fecundity of our bo often derided foreign-born population.