In suggesting that it would be possible for the State to ensure employment at ample wages to all that are born, if it only takes care that too many shall not be born, Mr. Mill differs a good deal from Mr. Malthus and from many of the _laissez faire_ economists of the school of Adam Smith. Persons who are great admirers of individual liberty confound, as is very often the case, the idea of freedom with that of the right to do wrong. It is quite clear that if in an old country, such as any of the European States, all classes of society were to engender as many children as is now done by the poorest and most thoughtless members, poverty would become as universal as it formerly was, when mankind were less civilised and had a very low standard of comfort. Mr. Mill and those who follow him in this contention, among whom is to be reckoned the author of the “Elements of Social Science,” affirm that, although it is quite true that a grown-up man or woman should be perfectly free to live his or her own life so far as relates to self-regarding actions, it is a confusion of ideas to style the bringing into life of another human being, an act purely self-regarding. When a country is over-peopled, or threatened with that greatest of all calamities, the production, it is held by these able writers, of more than a very small number of children by any couple is a gross offence against all who gain their living by toil, since the over-crowding of a country with human beings makes it very difficult for those at the bottom of society to get enough even of the coarsest food for themselves and their families, whilst life is rendered harder for all who have to gain it by services of any kind. The number of children to a family among the richer classes in France appears now to be on an average not quite two to a _family_: whereas the poorer classes in Paris and some of the less thoughtful districts of France have families of more than six on an average. London now exhibits the notable fact that, whereas in the comfortable parishes of Kensington, St. George Hanover Square, St. James Westminster, and Hampstead, the birth-rate in 1886 was not much above 21 per 1000 inhabitants annually; in the poor parishes of Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, St. George in the East, and Whitechapel the birth-rate was 38·6 per 1000 in that year, _i.e._, nearly twice as many children are born of 1000 persons in the poor quarters as in the rich. As a consequence of this, the death-rate in the East End is to that in the West End as 3 to 2. Mr. Mill, and in this I entirely concur with him, thinks that the State can and ought to discourage the production of large families by some social stigma, and the author of the “Elements of Social Science” thinks that some fine might be the penalty for the production of more than four children by any married pair. This he looks upon as a far juster way of checking rapid birth-rates than the