The number of marriages is decreasing, but the number of married women following professional pursuits is also increasing. If men are more timid than formerly in assuming matrimonial ties, or if women show as great a timidity in entering into a relation that promises hardships arising out of their complete economic dependence, the progress married women are making in the skilled industries and other lines of work compatible with their conception of their social status, will prove a large factor in restoring confidence in the mutual helpfulness made possible by marriage and tend to check the decrease of the marriage-rate. The decline of the birth-rate is a more serious problem. A large infant mortality prevails the world over and no effective means have been found to prevent this great sacrifice of life. Indeed the decrease of the birth-rate is comparatively small when compared with the waste of life by infantile diseases. If only some means were found to prevent this waste the decrease in the birth-rate would be one more illustration of the great economy in pain and suffering achieved by an advanced civilization. The real alarming thing is not a general decrease in the birth-rate but a decrease applying to the better social classes alone. The latter are made up of individuals who have enjoyed the advantages of our social institutions. If their superiority can be traced to their natural superiority rather than to their opportunities, made possible by their economic status, there exists genuine reason for alarm; but if humanity after all is much alike the world over, and the differences between types are due to opportunity, no better means can be found to meet the problem than by affording a wider diffusion of the benefits of a higher civilization. To bring this about cities must be made sanitary places in which to live and extreme poverty must be eliminated from the child’s environment. The decrease of the importance of women’s work in the home is not alone responsible for the changes in their status but also the modern close intercommunication of cosmopolitan groups made possible by modern industrial methods in the business world. The close relations existing between individuals and groups of individuals who have not always lived in the same environment, or the same kind of an environment stimulates many new desires and human faculties which might have remained dormant were the individual shut off from the close relations with the outside world. One of the results of this interaction is a disregard for the social barriers of the past, and a leveling of educational and social opportunities so that they are within the reach of a constantly increasing number of men and women alike.