As to the condition of the race in the early stages of "modern" civilization, we have modern Russia as a surviving instance of this stage. In modern Russia we find, side by side with the progress in neighboring nations, conditions which a few centuries ago existed all over Europe. Here we have an enormous birth-rate, and a terrible death-rate caused by ignorance, superstition, insanitation, filth, bad food, impure water, plagues, famines, and other accompaniments of overcrowding and misery. We find a mortality among young children which sometimes destroys more than half of the children born before they have attained the age of five years. As high as is the Russian birth-rate, it is a matter of record that at times the death-rate has actually exceeded it. And among the survivors there is found a startlingly large percentage of chronic and incurable diseases, with a large number of cases of blindness and other defects. Similar results follow in China, where the birth-rate is exceptionally high, and the death-rate correspondingly large; and where there is a large percentage of inferior physical development and pathological defects, the evil conditions which produce death also tending to produce deterioration in the survivors. In both of these countries we have an example of the result of unrestricted reproduction, and unrestricted destruction--as among herrings, so among men. And yet this condition of unrestricted reproduction is the logical goal of certain persons who, inspired by the best possible intentions, in their ignorance and criminal rashness would dare to arrest that fall in the birth-rate which is now beginning to spread its influence in every civilized land. In Western Europe before the nineteenth century the population increased very slowly. The enormous birth-rate was nearly equalled by the exceedingly heavy death-rate caused by plagues, pestilences, and famine, and by the frequent wars large and small. The mortality among young children was particularly heavy. Writers have pointed out that the old family records show frequently two or three children of the same Christian name, the first child having died and its name given to a successor. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, when machinery was introduced and a new industrial era opened, the birth-rate rose rapidly. Factories springing up gave increased support to many, and as children were employed as "hands" in the mills at an early age, the richest family was the one with most children. The population began to increase rapidly. But soon disease, misery, and poverty arose from filth and insanitation, immorality and crime, overcrowding and child-labor, drink and lack of sane courses of conduct.