When the question is thus narrowly and ignorantly considered, it is usual to account for the decreased birth-rate, the smaller average families, and the tendency to postpone the age of marriage, as due mainly to a love of luxury and vice, combined with a newly acquired acquaintance with Neo-Malthusian methods,
23 which must be combated, and may successfully be combated, by inculcating, as a moral and patriotic duty, the necessity of marrying early and procreating large families. 24 In France, the campaign against the
religious Orders in their educational capacity, while doubtless largely directed against educational inefficiency, was also supported by the feeling that such education is not on the side of family life; and Arsène Dumont, one of the most vigorous champions of a strenuously active policy for increasing the birth-rate, openly protested against allowing any place as teachers to priests, monks, and nuns, whose direct and indirect influence must degrade the conception of sex and its duties while exalting the place of celibacy. In the United States, also, Engelmann, who, as a gynæcologist, was able to see this process from behind the scenes, urged his fellow-countrymen "to stay the dangerous and criminal practices which are the main determining factors of decreasing fecundity, and which deprive women of health, the family of its highest blessings, and the nation of its staunchest support."
We must, however, look at these phenomena a little more broadly, and bring them into relation with other series of phenomena. It is almost beyond dispute that a voluntary restriction of the number of offspring by Neo-Malthusian practices is at least one of the chief methods by which the birth-rate has been lowered. It may not indeed be—and probably, as we shall see, is not—the only method. It has even been denied that the prevalence of Neo-Malthusian practices counts at all.26