“They depend,” according to one writer,[44] “either on physical agents, especially climate, or on the degree of civilization of a people, their domestic and social habits.” “In France the climate is favorable to an increase of population, and this obstacle, this restraint, is found in its advanced civilization.”[45] “This diminution of births,” says Legoyt,[46] “in the presence of a constant increase of the general population and of marriages, can be attributed to nothing else than wise and increased foresight on the part of the parent.” “The French peasant is no simple countryman, no downright ‘Paysan du Danube;’ both in fact and in fiction he is now ‘le rusé paysan.’ That is the stage which he has reached in the progressive development which _the constitution of things has imposed on human intelligence and human emancipation_.”[47] “These facts are only to be accounted for in two ways. Either the whole number of births which nature admits of, and which happen in some circumstances, do not take place, or if they do, a large proportion of those who are born, die. The retardation of increase results either from mortality or prudence; from Mr. Malthus’s positive, or from his preventive check; and one or the other of these must and does exist, and very powerfully too, in all old societies. Wherever population is not kept down by the prudence of individuals or of the State, it is kept down by starvation or disease.”[48] But on the other hand, it has been forgotten that the alternative supposed does not exist in the case we have instanced. Marriages in France, unlike some other continental States, are continually increasing, and starvation and disease are yearly being shorn of their power. The authors quoted are therefore forced to a single position; that the lessening of births can only be owing to “prudence” on the part of the community. Moreover, it is allowed by Mill and by Malthus himself,[49] that so much of the decrease as cannot thus be explained, must be attributed to influences generally prevalent in Europe in earlier ages, and in Asia to the present time. “Throughout Europe these causes have much diminished, but they have nowhere ceased to exist.”[50] Several of them have been named by the authority now quoted. Another, and greater than them all, he leaves unspoken; we are compelled to supply for him the omission.