he regards as purely intimate and private. But the real character of this tendency of the birth-rate, as an essential phenomenon of civilization, with which neither moralist nor politician can successfully hope to interfere, is beginning to be realized in France. Azoulay, in summing up the discussion after Macquart's paper5 had been read at the Society of Anthropology, pointed out that "nations must inevitably follow the same course as social classes, and the more the mass of these social classes becomes civilized, the more the nation's birth-rate falls; therefore there is nothing to be done legally and administratively." And another member added: "Except to applaud."
It is probably too much to hope that so sagacious a view will at once be universally adopted. The United States and the great English colonies, for instance, find it difficult to realize that they are not really new countries, but branches of old countries, and already nearing maturity when they began their separate lives. They are not at the beginning of two thousand years of slow development, such as we have passed through, but at the end of it, with us, and sometimes even a little ahead of us.