When we reach the human animal, we find in addition to pestilence, war, and “acts of God,” various forms of voluntary check. Semi-civilized countries manage the affair rather crudely; in India the Ganges is hardly yet free from infant corpses, and in China girl babies show an assisted mortality. More civilized countries limit the birth rate more felicitously, reducing the number of marriages and advancing the age of marriage, by imposing social, ethical, and financial obligations. This decreases the number of possible children. These indirect checks held back the increase of population so slightly, evenly and over so long a period as to be hardly perceptible. In the seventies appeared a phenomenon of spectacular novelty—the small family. Harmless methods of contraception had been perfected, the knowledge disseminated, and the means supplied. The birth rate, which had slowly declined through aeons, from eggs by the millions to yearly babies, dropped with dizzying rapidity. As the birth rates of the nations fall, so fall the death rates. Here are the death rates for the same ten nations for the same years as the previous birth rate table. Yearly Number of Deaths per 1,000 Inhabitants 1881–5 1906–10 Russia (European) 35.4 30.9[5] Hungary 33.1 25.0 Spain 32.6 24.3 Austria 30.1 22.3 Italy 27.3 21.0 German Empire 25.3 19.9[5] France 22.2 19.2 Belgium 20.6 17.0[5] England and Wales 19.4 14.7 The Netherlands 21.4 14.3 Footnote 5: Figures for previous five years. A comparison of the two tables shows immediately that the countries having the highest birth rate have also the highest death rate. Russia, which heads the list in births, heads the list in deaths. Hungary comes second in both lists. Next come, in a slightly altered order, the four countries, German Empire, Spain, Austria and Italy. An exception occurs in France which has the unusual combination of a low birth rate and a medium death rate. Belgium, and England and Wales occupy the same position in both lists with low birth rates and low death rates. The Netherlands is the notable country with its medium birth rate and its low death rate. The Neo-Malthusians love to mention at this point that this country has governmental encouragement in teaching contraception.