In the nine years, from 1838 to 1847, omitting 1842 for reasons stated below, there were 632 premature still-births, and 6445 still at the full time; a yearly average of 1 in 10.2. In the eight years, from 1848 to 1855, there were 2078 premature still-births, and 10,792 still at the full time; an average of 1 in 5. While in 1856 there were 387 still prematurely, and 1556 at the full time; or 1 in 4.02. From these figures there can be drawn but one conclusion, that criminal abortion prevails to an enormous extent in New York, and that it is steadily and rapidly increasing. “We cannot refer,” was well said by a former inspector of that city,[37] “such a hecatomb of human offspring to natural causes.” We shall now endeavor to prove this point by other reasoning. That our deductions concerning the population and births of France are perfectly legitimate, is admitted beforehand by the leading political economists of the day; ignorant as they were in its various relations of much of the evidence now brought forward, and of the conclusion to which the whole matter, directly and with almost mathematical exactness, is proved to tend. “In France,” remarks De Jonnés,[38] “the fecundity of the people is restrained within the strictest limits.” “The rate of increase of the French population,” says Mill, “is the slowest in Europe;[39] the number of births not increasing at all, while the proportion of births to the population is considerably diminishing.”[40] We have seen, moreover, that in France the actual ratio of living births is constantly and rapidly diminishing, while the still-births, actual and proportional, are as fast increasing; that the premature births progress in similar ratio, and by deduction and actual statistics, the criminal abortions; and that these facts obtain not merely in the metropolis, but throughout the country. What are the causes of these remarkable facts, need it now be asked? Let all allowances be made for certain conjugal habits extensively existing among the French, and by no means rarely imitated in this country, but the proportionate decrease of living births is too enormous, the actual and proportionate increase of premature and still-births is too frightful to be wholly explained thus, or as West,[41] Husson,[42] and De Jonnés[43] have thought, to be attributed to a mere progressive lack of fecundity. Reason and the evidence alleged compel us to believe that in great measure they are owing to criminal abortion. Political economists allow the facts in France to be as we have stated. Their interpretation of the causes, unwilling as they would be to confess its ultimate bearing, we now compel to serve as evidence.