[Footnote 26: Poverty is a term of wide import admitting many degrees according as the victim is deprived more or less completely of the ordinary necessities in the matters of food, clothing, housing, education, and recreation. As used by Malthusians and spoken of here it means persistent lack of one or more of these necessary requisites for decent living. Vide Parkinson, _Primer of Social Science_ (1918), pp. 225 sqq.] [Footnote 27: The infant mortality rate is the number of deaths of infants under one year old per 1,000 births in the same year.] [Footnote 28: See Saleeby, _The Factors of Infant Mortality_, edited by Cory Bigger. _Report on the Physical Welfare of Mothers and Children_, vol. iv, Ireland (Carnegie U.K. Trust), 1918.] [Footnote 29: _Fifty-fifth Annual Report of the Registrar-General for Ireland, containing a General Abstract of the Numbers of Marriages, Births, and Deaths_, 1918, pp. x, xxix, and 24.] [Footnote 30: _Eighty-first Annual Report of the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages in England and Wales_, 1918, pp. xxiv, xxxii, and xxxv.] [Footnote 31: This is also the emphatic testimony of Sir Arthur Newsholme, in his _Report of Child Mortality_, issued in connection with the _Forty-fifth Annual Report of the Local Government Board_ (dated 191?), PP. 77-8.] [Footnote 32: Knud Stouman, "The Repopulation of France," _International Journal of Public Health_, vol. ii, no. 4, p. 421.] [Footnote 33: Dr. Major Greenwood. Vide _The Declining Birth-rate_, 1916, p. 130.] [Footnote 34: _International Journal of Public Health_, vol. ii, no. 4, p. 423.] CHAPTER IV HOW RELIGION AFFECTS THE BIRTHRATE Section 1. FRENCH STATISTICS MISINTERPRETED BY MALTHUSIANS The fact that Malthusians are in the habit of citing the birth-rate in certain Catholic countries as a point in favour of their propaganda is only another instance of their maladroit use of figures: because for that argument there is not the slightest justification. The following paragraph from a recent speech [35] in the Anglican Church Congress by Lord Dawson, Physician to the King, is a good example of their methods in controversy: "Despite the influence and condemnations of the Church, it (artificial birth control) has been practised in France for well over half a century, and in Belgium and other Catholic countries is extending. And if the Roman Catholic Church, with its compact organisation, its power of authority, and its discipline, cannot check this procedure, is it likely that Protestant Churches will be able to do so? For Protestant religions depend for their strength on _the conviction and esteem they establish in the heads and hearts of their people_."