For years before the war the falling birth-rate in France was recognized as the most serious social and economic problem that threatened the future of the country. The war, with its death-roll of nearly a million and a quarter young Frenchmen, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of others who are maimed for life and rendered incapable of providing for the maintenance of families, has enormously increased the gravity of the problem. But apart from these obvious and well-known factors, the years of war and those which have intervened since the armistice have produced a further decline in the population which only a revolution in the prevailing standards of family life in France can remedy.

The statistics of the French birth-rate and death-rate, apart altogether from the awful roll of honour of the French armies in the war, are so terribly eloquent that no juggling with figures could obscure their meaning. It was not to be hoped that even in the year after the armistice, the normal birth-rate would have been restored. But in the year 1919 alone, which surely deserves to count as one of the most glorious in the history of France, there were only three out of her ninety departments in which the population did not actually decline. In all the other eighty-seven the number of deaths during the year was in excess of the number of births, and in no less than twelve—not even counting in the departments devastated by the war—the births did not equal even half the total of deaths.