M. Muret made some calculations at Vevey respecting the fecundity of marriages. He found that 375 mothers had produced 2,093 children: _i.e._, about six children each: and he also found that there were 20 sterile women out of 478, or about 1 in 23 wives. Taking this into account, the average number of children to a family at Vevey was 5⅓. In modern France it is about 3, in Prussia 4·68, and in England about 4¼. In those days, the proportion of annual marriages to population was lower in the Canton de Vaud than even in Norway, being only 1 in 140. In the model village of Leyzin only one-fifth of the total mortality was among persons under fifteen. Such were the results of what Mr. Malthus considered as the only true “moral restraint,” late marriages. All these calculations of M. Muret imply the operation of the preventive check to population in a very great degree in the Canton de Vaud. In the town of Berne, the proportion of unmarried persons, including widows and widowers, was considerably above the half of the adults, and the proportion of the living below sixteen to those above was nearly as 1 to 3 in the beginning of this century. The peasants in Berne were noted for comfort and wealth, doubtless owing to the low birth-rate in that country. A law there prevented those who had no means from marrying. Mr. Malthus gives an amusing account of a conversation he had with a peasant who went with him from the Lac de Joux to the sources of the river Orbe. This man said that the habit if early marriage might be really said to be the vice of the country: and he was so strongly impressed with the necessary and unavoidable wretchedness that must result from it, that he thought a law ought to be made restricting men from entering into the married state before they were forty years of age, and then allowing it only with old maids, who might bear them two or three children instead of six or eight. That peasant would have been, we doubt not, one of the most zealous advocates of the _two children system_, so wonderfully carried out in many of the most flourishing districts of France, and probably would have abandoned all desire to keep prudent couples like those in these French districts from marrying. We hold with that simple peasant of the Jura, who had learnt the truths he expounded by sad and cruel experience, he having married himself when very young, and with his family, suffered much from poverty, that governments are culpable when they do not attempt to lessen high birth-rates. To forbid early marriage, indeed, is to encourage prostitution and cause many other evils; but to affix a stigma on those who produce large families is, as far as we can see, a plan which can only produce good and need produce no evil results. It is an utter misunderstanding of the rights of the individual to suppose that each man and woman ought to have the _right_ to cause misery to their unfortunate children, and at the same time produce a pressure upon the