CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM STATED.
_The spread of moral restraint as a check .-- Predicted by Malthus .-- The declining Birth-rate .-- Its Universality .-- Most conspicuous in New Zealand .-- Great increase in production of food .-- With rising food rate falling birth-rate .-- Malthus's checks .-- His use of the term "moral restraint."-- The growing desire to evade family obligations .-- Spread of physiological knowledge .-- All limitation involves self restraint .-- Motives for limitation .-- Those who do and those who do not limit .-- Poverty and the Birth-rate.

Defectives prolific and propagate their kind .-- Moral restraint held to include all sexual interference designed to limit families .-- Power of self-control an attribute of the best citizens .-- Its absence an attribute of the worst .-- Humanitarianism increases the number and protects the lives of defectives .-- The ratio of the unfit to the fit .-- Its dangers to the State .-- Antiquity of the problem .-- The teaching of the ancients .-- Surgical methods already advocated._ A century has passed since Malthus made his immortal contribution to the supreme problem of all ages and all people, but the whole aspect of the population question has changed since his day.

The change, however, was anticipated by the great economist, and predicted in the words:--"The history of modern civilisation is largely the history of the gradual victory of the third check over the two others" (_vide_ Essay, 7th edition, p.

476).

The third check is moral restraint and the two others vice and misery.
The statistics of all civilized nations show a gradual and progressive decline in the birth-rate much more marked of recent years.