What has happened in France is what happened in Rome long before. It was not because of the inrush of barbaric hosts that Rome perished, but because Rome sacrificed its children. In its golden age, when luxury clouded the heart, Rome began to avoid the responsibilities of family life, and so sounded the death-knell of its empire. Here is ever the source of human {7} decay. The most perfect intellectual and æsthetic civilisation ever developed on earth was that of the ancient Greeks. 'We know and may guess something more of the reason why this marvellously gifted race declined,' says Francis Galton. 'Social morality grew exceedingly lax, marriage became unfashionable and was avoided; many of the more ambitious and accomplished women were avowed courtesans and consequently infertile, and the mothers of the incoming population were of a heterogeneous class.' And the misery which lay so heavily on the heart of Hosea was that Israel was rushing to destruction because children ceased to be born. National licentiousness produced a diminishing population. 'And there are no more births,' cries the prophet beholding the coming doom. Over us the skies are darkening with the portents of the same doom. For we also have given ourselves to the same degeneration. To Puritanic Scotland, a generation ago, France was oft quoted as a solemn {8} warning of the depths to which atheism and materialism bring a nation. To-day Scotland as a whole is only four points behind France in the matter of this degeneration, and the city of Edinburgh has outstripped even France. And though this policy of the silent nursery and the empty cradle is a policy of racial doom, the land of the Covenanters and the capital of Presbyterianism have made it their own. They have out-Heroded Herod. III