When we realise this we are also enabled to realise how futile, how misplaced, and how mischievous it is to raise the cry of "Race-suicide." It is futile because no outcry can affect a world-wide movement of civilisation. It is misplaced because the rise and fall of the population is not a matter of the birth-rate alone, but of the birth-rate combined with the death-rate, and while we cannot expect to touch the former we can influence the latter. It is mischievous because by fighting against a tendency which is not only inevitable but altogether beneficial, we blind ourselves to the advance of civilisation and risk the misdirection of all our energies. How far this blindness may be carried we see in the false patriotism of those who in the decline of the birth-rate fancy they see the ruin of their own particular country, oblivious of the fact that we are concerned with a phenomenon of world-wide extension. The whole tendency of civilisation is to reduce the birth-rate, as Leroy-Beaulieu concludes in his comprehensive work on the population question. We may go further, and assert with the distinguished German economist, Roscher, that the chief cause of the superiority of a highly civilised State over lower stages of civilisation is precisely a greater degree of forethought and self-control in marriage and child-bearing.[4] Instead of talking about race-suicide, we should do well to observe at what an appalling rate, even yet, the population is increasing, and we should note that it is everywhere the poorest and most primitive countries, and in every country (as in Germany) the poorest regions, which show the highest birth-rate. On every hand, however, are hopeful signs. Thus, in Russia, where a very high birth-rate is to some extent compensated by a very high death-rate--the highest infantile death-rate in Europe--the birth-rate is falling, and we may anticipate that it will fall very rapidly with the extension of education and social enlightenment among the masses. Driven out of Europe, the alarmist falls back on the "Yellow Peril." But in Japan we find amid confused variations of the birth-rate and the death-rate nothing to indicate any alarming expansion of the population, while as to China we are in the dark. We only know that in China there is a high birth-rate largely compensated by a very high death-rate. We also know, however, that as Lowes Dickinson has lately reminded us, "the fundamental attitude of the Chinese towards life is that of the most modern West,"[5] and we shall probably find that with the growth of enlightenment the Chinese will deal with their high birth-rate in a far more radical and thorough manner than we have ever ventured on.