The student of international vital statistics will be struck first by the very wide differences in the birth-rate of different countries. He will then notice that the more backward countries have on the whole a considerably higher birth-rate than the more advanced. Thirdly, he will observe the parallelism between the birth-rate and death-rate, which makes the net increase in countries with a high birth-rate very little larger than that of countries with a low birth-rate. The following figures will illustrate these points; they are taken from the Registrar-General's Blue Book for 1912. Birth-rate Death-rate Net rate of increase United Kingdom 23.9 13.8 10.1 Australia 28.7 11.2 17.5 Austria 31.3 20.5 10.8 Belgium 22.9 16.4 6.5 France 19.0 17.5 1.5 Germany 28.6 17.3 11.3 Italy 32.4 18.2 14.2 New Zealand 26.5 8.9 17.6 Norway 25.4 13.4 12.0 Roumania 43.4 22.9 20.5 Russia 44.0 28.9 15.1 It will be seen that Australia and New Zealand, with low birth-rates and the lowest death-rates in the world increase more rapidly than Russia with an enormous birth-rate and proportionately high death-rate. No one can doubt that our colonies achieve their increase with far less friction and misery than the prolific but short-lived Slavs. Civilisation in a high form is incompatible with such conditions as these figures disclose in Russia. The figures for Egypt and India are similar to the Russian, but in India, which is overfull, the mortality is greater than even in Russia, and the same is true of China, in which we are told that seven out of ten children die in infancy. It has been suggested that the fairest measure of a country's well-being, as regards its actual vitality, is the square of the death-rate divided by the birth-rate.