It is not easy to ascertain the exact tendencies of reproduction in our own historical past or among the lower races of to-day. On the whole, it seems fairly clear that, under ordinary savage and barbarous conditions, rather more children are produced and rather more children die than among ourselves; there is, in other words, a higher birth-rate and a higher infantile death-rate.[3] A high birth-rate with a low death-rate seems to have been even more exceptional than among ourselves, for under inelastic social conditions the community cannot adjust itself to the rapid expansion that would thus be rendered necessary. The community contracts, as it were, on this expanding portion and largely crushes it out of life by the forces of neglect, poverty, and disease.[4] The only part of Europe in which we can to-day see how this works out on a large scale is Russia, for here we find in an exaggerated form conditions, which once tended to rule all over Europe, side by side with the beginnings of better things, with scientific progress and statistical observation. Yet in Russia, up till recently, if not even still, there has only been about one doctor to every twelve thousand inhabitants, and the witch-doctor has flourished. Small-pox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, typhoid, and syphilis also flourish, and not only flourish, but show an enormously higher mortality than in other European countries. More significant still, famine and typhus, the special disease of filth and overcrowding and misery--both of them banished, save in the most abnormal times, from the rest of Europe--have in modern times ravaged Russia on a vast scale. Ignorance, superstition, insanitation, filth, bad food, impure water, lead to a vast mortality among children which has sometimes destroyed more than half of them before they reach the age of five; so that, enormously high as the Russian birth-rate is, the death-rate has sometimes exceeded it.[5] Nor is it found, as some would-be sagacious persons confidently assert, that the high birth-rate is justified by the better quality of the survivors. On the contrary, there is a very large proportion of chronic and incurable diseases among the survivors; blindness and other defects abound; and though there are many very large and fine people in Russia, the average stature of the Russians is lower than that of most European peoples.[6]