whole of the Victorian period, emigration of the most vigorous stocks took place to a very marked extent. It is not difficult to see the influence of such emigration in connection with the greatly diminished population of Ireland, as compared with Scotland; and we may reasonably infer that it has had its part in the decreased fertility of the United Kingdom generally.
But we encounter the remarkable fact that this decreased fertility of the Anglo-Saxon populations is not confined to the United Kingdom. It is even more pronounced in those very lands to which so many thousand shiploads of our best people have been taken. In the United States the question has attracted much attention, and there is little disagreement among careful observers as to the main facts of the situation. The question is, indeed, somewhat difficult for two reasons: the registration of births is not generally compulsory in the United States, and, even when general facts are ascertained, it is still necessary to distinguish between the different classes of the population. Our conclusions must therefore be based, not on the course of a general birth-rate, but on the most reliable calculations, based on the census returns and on the average size of the family at different periods, and among different classes of the population. A bulletin of the Census Bureau of the United States since 1860 was prepared a few years ago by Walter F. Wilcox, of Cornell University. It determines from the data in the census office the proportion of children to the number of women of child-bearing age in the country at different periods, and shows that there has been, on the whole, a fall from the beginning to the end of the last century. Children under ten years of age constituted one-third of the population at the beginning of the century, and at the end less than one-fourth of the total population. Between 1850 and 1860 the proportion of children to women between fifteen and forty-nine years of age increased, but since 1860 it has constantly decreased. In 1860 the number of children under five years of age to one