'Away down the river, A hundred miles or more, Other little children Shall bring our boats ashore.' But alas! when the greatest of all calamities has overtaken the race; when the young, the noble, and the brave have lain down in death that the nation might live, the feet of the little children, on which erstwhile the race marched forward, are not there. We have offered them up a sacrifice to Moloch. II The nation must be wakened to the dire peril in which the steadily falling birthrate has placed the race. Militarism {5} slays its thousands; this has strangled its hundreds of thousands. But no warning note has been sounded by our statesmen. They were doubtless waiting to see! The might of every nation depends on the reservoir of its vitality. Let that desiccate and the nation desiccates. Of this France is the proof. That France which, a hundred years ago, overran Europe, fifty years later lay prostrate under the feet of Germany. Twenty years before that national humiliation, France began to sacrifice her children. Lord Acton pointed out the inevitable result; the wise of their own number warned them--but France went on its way down the slope of moral degeneration. Its birthrate fell from 30.8 in 1821 to 26.2 in 1851, 25.4 in 1871, 22.1 in 1891, 20.6 in 1901, and to 19 in 1914. The result was inevitable. In the race of empire France fell slowly back. The alien had to be imported to cultivate her own fair fields. She annexed territories, but she could {6} not colonise them. The prophets who prophesied doom have been abundantly justified. To-day France, risen from the dead, is wrestling for her life; she is impotent to drive back the foe without the help of Britain and Russia--she who dominated Europe a century ago! When we read of a Russian army, after a journey round half the world, landing at Marseilles to take their place in the trenches that Paris may be saved from the devastators of Belgium and Poland, we see the fields ripe for the harvest of that policy which sacrificed the race to the individual. The hope for France is that she will rise from the grave of her degeneration, new-born.