Still, birth control is not new. If it did not originate with the Indians, it did at least with the Puritans. As the census books and genealogy books show, every succeeding American generation has manifested a tendency to reduce the birth-rate. The new aspects of the situation are the acceleration of the tendency and the propaganda for family limitation by artificial methods. In the birth registration area, which includes twenty-three States, the number of births for the year 1919 compared with those for 1918 showed a slump of seven per cent. Also the current assumption that children are more numerous on farms, where they are an economic asset, than they are in cities, where they became an economic handicap, has recently received a startling correction through a survey made by the Department of Agriculture. Among the surprises of the study, says the report, was the small number of children in farm homes:--“Child life is at a premium in rural districts.” The farm is not the national child reserve it has been supposed to be. As far as the salaried class is concerned, it has stood out as the national pace-setter in family limitation. The editorial writer of the New York _Times_, who may be trusted for a fairly accurate statement of the standards of this group, justifies its conduct thus: “Unless the brain-worker is willing to disclass his children, to subject them to humiliation, he must be willing to feed, clothe, and educate them during many years. In such circumstances, to refuse parenthood is only human.” It therefore remains for the manual worker, who cannot obtain from his Church the same absolution that the suburban resident can obtain from his _Times_, to produce the bulk of the population. This, as a whole, is not yet stationary; the recent census estimates an annual excess of births over deaths throughout the United States amounting to about one per cent. What will the next decade do with it?