The pioneers were English. Among them Malthus occupies the first place. That distinguished man, in his great and influential work, _The Principle of Population_, in 1798, emphasised the immense importance of foresight and self-control in procreation, and the profound significance of birth limitation for human welfare. Malthus relied, however, on ascetic self-restraint, a method which could only appeal to the few; he had nothing to say for the prevention of conception in intercourse. That was suggested, twenty years later, very cautiously by James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, in the _Encyclopedia Britannica_. Four years afterwards, Mill's friend, the Radical reformer, Francis Place, advocated this method more clearly. Finally, in 1831, Robert Dale Owen, the son of the great Robert Owen, published his _Moral Physiology_, in which he set forth the ways of preventing conception; while a little later the Drysdale brothers, ardent and unwearying philanthropists, devoted their energies to a propaganda which has been spreading ever since and has now conquered the whole civilised world. It was not, however, in England but in France, so often at the head of an advance in civilisation, that birth control first became firmly established, and that the extravagantly high birth-rate of earlier times began to fall; this happened in the first half of the nineteenth century, whether or not it was mainly due to voluntary control.[10] In England the movement came later, and the steady decline in the English birth-rate, which is still proceeding, began in 1877. In the previous year there had been a famous prosecution of Bradlaugh and Mrs. Besant for disseminating pamphlets describing the methods of preventing conception; the charge was described by the Lord Chief Justice, who tried the case, as one of the most ill-advised and injudicious ever made in a court of justice. But it served an undesigned end by giving enormous publicity to the subject and advertising the methods it sought to suppress. There can be no doubt, however, that even apart from this trial the movement would have proceeded on the same lines. The times were ripe, the great industrial expansion had passed its first feverish phase, social conditions were improving, education was spreading. The inevitable character of the movement is indicated by the fact that at the very same time it began to be manifested all over Europe, indeed in every civilised country of the world. At the present time the birth-rate (as well as usually the death-rate) is falling in every country of the world sufficiently civilised to possess statistics of its own vital movement. The fall varies in rapidity. It has been considerable in the more progressive countries; it has lingered in the more backward countries. If we examine the latest statistics for Europe (usually those for 1913) we find that every country, without exception, with a progressive and educated population, and a fairly high state of