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fact of observation is that the lower classes of life, the poor and ignorant, are very prolific, while the higher classes, the rich, intellectual, and aristocratic, tend to sterility. As men rise in culture and in varied means of enjoyment, they resort less to animal gratifications. The very poor have scarce any other.

On examining the facts in the case more closely, it will always be found that it is not the excess of population which causes the misery, but the misery which causes the excess of population. Hopeless poverty makes men imprudent and reckless, and leads them to burden themselves with a family because they cannot be worse off, and there is no possibility of improving their condition. In Switzerland, where the land is parceled out among small proprietors, the peasantry obtain a comfortable livelihood, and, therefore, increase so slowly that the population will not double itself in less than two hundred and twenty-seven years. In France, where also the land is cut up into very small estates, and the peasantry are vastly better off than in England, the rate of increase for the population for ten years is only five per cent. In England, for the same period, it was fifteen per cent. ; and in Connaught, the sink of Irish misery and degradation, between 1821 and 1831 it was as high as twenty-two per cent. In Galway and Mayo, notoriously two of the most destitute counties, during the same period, there was an increase in the one case of twentyseven and in the other of twenty-five per cent.-nearly as great as in the United States. Thus the two extremes of general misery and general well-being produce very nearly the same effect on the movement of the population.-P. 454.

In England it is a matter of common observation that the families of the nobility and landed gentry constantly tend to die out, and, if they were not recruited by promotions from the middle classes, the upper orders of society would gradually disappear. Of the barons who sat in the English House of Lords in 1854, the peerage of considerably more than one half does not date back beyond 1800; and not more than thirty of them can boast that their ancestors were ennobled before 1711. The continued and increasing opulence of the landed gentry of England is chiefly attributable to this cause; since the diminution of their numbers tends, of course, to the concentration of their estates. Celibate or childless lives are common among the younger sons of the nobility and gentry, while they are very infrequent in the classes of artisans and laborers. Even here, in the eastern part of the United States, the sons in educated and wealthy families marry later in life, and have fewer children, than those in the classes who live by handiwork; while the Irish laborers are the most prolific of all. No further back than the beginning of this century families containing from ten to fifteen children each were not infrequent here in New England; now, one that has more than six is seldom found except among the very poor.-P. 455.

DARWINISM IS ANIMAL MALTHUSIANISM.

Darwinism is based on the same assumption of the overwhelming fecundity of animal life and the beneficence of destruction. In this battle of destruction it is the animal endowed with the best advantages for the struggle that survives and propagates his like, and so arise species. And so, too, result the rising of species into higher grades, for it is the best that survives. And as the slight variations of the new-born animals are properly accidental, that is, guided by no intention, so an air of what allow us to call accidentality is flung over the whole process, quite acceptable to Atheism. But here, alas, as Professor Bowen shows, comes in the true principle of fecundity that upsets this theory. In both the animal and vegetable worlds the law prevails that low life is prolific and high life is chary of over-propagation. Insects and fishes propagate by billions and trillions, but mammals by half dozens. It is by this secret principle of superior fecundity in animal life that species survive, and not by any slight individual accidental advantage, which is sure to be obliterated in a generation or two, that species prevail. "Natural selection," therefore, is a fallacy. And when art steps in and arbitrarily selects, art can improve, can vary wonderfully sometimes, and fantastically even, but the new forms tend to reversion, to sterility, and are rarely permanent.

Between low life and high life there arises this remarkable conservative balance, that the former is protected by its numbers and the latter by its strength. And if a battle between the two can be imagined, the low would be most likely to conquer, and the unfittest to survive. The Professor piquantly says:

If a battle of this sort were possible, victory in it would not depend on superiority of organization. The existence not of the lower races, but of the higher ones, would be imperiled. We can foresee this result in our own case, whether we compare the different classes of human society with each other, or man himself, the order primates, with the inferior animals. In the grand "struggles" which will occur about the time of the Greek Kalends, the primitive stocks, such as Irish bog-trotters and Welsh peasants, would certainly "survive" the nobility and gentry, though the latter profit by the accumulated advantages of high breeding transmitted by direct inheritance through a pedigree extending back to William the Conqueror. And, in the final FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXII.-11

stage of the conflict even these original poor representatives of humanity must die out long before some of the animals far below them. Those pests of our summer, the insect tribes, would sing the requiem of man, and feast on his remains. Accordingly, the only original and distinctive feature of Darwinism-its attempt to explain away the argument from design for the being of a God by showing that the supposed adaptations of means to ends, and the admirably complex arrangements by which every portion of a living organism is fitted to do its proper work, may all be accounted for by the blind and unconscious action of mechanical principles and physical laws, without calling in anywhere a Divine purpose or a contriving Mind-must be regarded as a baseless hypothesis. A careful study of the successive develop. ment of the higher forms of life upon the earth does not invalidate, but fully confirms, the doctrine which has been held by every great thinker, from Socrates down to the present day, that no organism could have been produced without an organizing mind. -P. 462.

PESSIMISM.

Seen under the desperation of Malthus and the accidentalism of Darwin, deprived of all the lights and colorings of a higher faith, the universe is a dismal presentation, and daguerreotypes itself on the predisposed mind as Pessimism. Life is worthless. Man is a lump of matter crowded into a certain shape by a concurrence of blind forces, stimulated by a force called life, with certain molecular motions in his upper end called thought. Shatter the lump, and the molecular motion stops; and what of it? Just as well as if it kept a-going. My life is worthless; your life is worthless. All moralities are dissolved, and crime is just as good as innocence. And the more sincere these views, the worse they are, and the more dangerous the men who hold them. "Educated men, who have come to regard their own lives as only a burden to them, though they have been driven to despair, not by the privations and miseries which afflict the hopelessly poor, but by an insensate theory which teaches them to consider the existence of the human race itself as an intolerable evil, that can be abated most effectually by reducing society to anarchy and ruin, and who have prepared themselves for the admission of this theory by getting rid of all the restraints of morality and religion-these are foes truly formidable, against whom all the precautions and means of defense which governments can institute seem to be of little avail. This is the real ground of the terror recently inspired by the

Nihilists in Russia and by the leaders of what is called 'the social democracy' in Germany.'

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Such is the anarchic abyss before us. To its brink we are led by Darwinism and Haeckelism. And the only remedy we have against it is the earnest hope of immortality, the powerful revival of Christian faith.

AMERICAN CATHOLIC QUARTERLY REVIEW, October, 1879. (Philadelphia.)-1. The Car nadian Element in the United States; by J. G. Shea, LL.D. 2. Modern and Ancient Philosophy Compared; by Rev. J. Ming, S. J. 3. De La Salle: His Life and Work; by M. O'R. 4. Recent Progress in Stellar Physics; by Rev. J. M. Degni, S. J. 5. The Mormons; by General John Gibbon, U. S. A. 6. The Internal Condition of Russia; by A. de G. 7. Cardinal Pole; by Rev. M. J. M'Loughlin. 8. The Recent Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII.; by Very Rev. James A. Corcoran, D.D.

Our graceful and scholarly Roman contemporary contains the Epistola Encyclica of Pope Leo, commending St. Thomas Aquinas to the faith of the Church. We suppose this preeminence is justly due to St. Thomas as being the greatest the ologian of the Middle Ages, and among the greatest intellects of any age. He is so indorsed now by infallibility that his works appear to be endowed with an intrinsic infallible authority, and his words, like those of Trent, may be safely quoted as a binding authority. And perhaps this infallibilizing process is now performed to secure the theology of the Church against any future disturbing vagary of the infallible spokesman, and make all firm. It may be a surprise to some that he is placed above Augustine; a fact, perhaps, in some measure due to Augustine's predestinarianism. For, great as Augustine's authority was, his fatalisms were never accepted, as is generally as sumed they were, by the Western Church. The creed of Trent is not Augustinian. The Church doctors, in refuting the Jansenists, were greatly embarrassed by the authority of Augustine. The following is a Jubilate for our Yankee brethren:

Meanwhile Catholic Canada is sending her Catholic sons, her priests, her devoted sisterhoods, into this country. New England, which sought with such rabid hate to crush Canada and Canadian Catholicity, now sees her towns swarm with Canadian Catholics, with churches and convents. Did the early Cottons, and Mathers, and Endicotts, and Winthrops ever dream of such a result? Did they foresee that when their stern unchristian Calvinism had given place to Unitarianism there would be seventy thousand Canadian Catholics in Massachusetts, thirteen thousand in New Hampshire, more than twice as many in the New Hampshire

Grants, ten thousand in Rhode Island, and as many in Connecticut, and twenty-six thousand in the district of Maine, living their Canadian life, with church, and priest, and nun, reproducing that hated province on that New England soil which they sought to separate by a wall of fire from all dissent? Catholics of other lands there would be in their eyes bad enough; the despised Irish Catholics bad, very bad; Catholics of New England lineage, and many there be, horrible enough; but nothing, we think, would have curdled the blood of those New England worthies of the early part of last century more than the mere suggestion of the possibility that the day would come when one hundred and fifty thousand Canadian Catholics would quietly seat themselves on the sacred soil of New England !—P. 604.

English Reviews.

BRITISH AND FOREIGN EVANGELICAL REVIEW, October, 1879. (London.)—1. J. T. Beck of Tübingen; by R. W. Barbour. 2. Michael Bruce versus John Logan; by the Rev. R. Small. 3. The Rule of Righteousness. 4. The Day of Our Lord's Last Supper; by the Rev. George Brown. 5. The Canadian North-west and the Gospel; by George Patterson, D.D. 6. The Historical Personality of Christ in the Four Gospels; by A. N. Macnicoll. 7. Muhammadan Exegesis of the Quran and Traditions; by the Rev. Edward Sell. 8. The Controversy Between John Welsh and Gilbert Brown in 1598; or "Where was the Protestant Religion before Luther?" by the Rev. W. Irwin. 9. Review of Recent Litera

ture on the Criticism and Interpretation of the New Testament; by the Rev. Professor Salmond.

BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, October, 1879. (London.)-1. Adolphe Monod: A Biographical Sketch. 2. Irenæus; His Testimony to Early Conceptions of Christianity. 3. Dr. Johnson. 4. The Vatican and Civilization. 5. What is Religion? 6. Political Prospects of Italy. 7. University Education in Ireland. EDINBURGH REVIEW, October, 1879. (New York)-1. Germany since the Peace of Frankfort. 2. Mozart. 3. The Philosophy of Color. 4. Spedding's Life of Bacon. 5. The Civil Engineers of Britain. 6. The Family of Mirabeau. 7. Froude's Cæsar. 8. The Code of Criminal Law. 9. Impressions of Theophrastus Such. 10. Afghanistan.

LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW, October, 1879. (London.)-1. Prophecies Concerning Israel after the Captivity. 2. The English Church in the Eighteenth Century. 8. Ladies' Work among the Poor. 4. The Ancient British Church. 5. Dr. Eadie. 6. Colenso's Last Volume and Supernatural Religion. 7. The Evangelical Alli. ance at Basle.

LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW, October, 1879. (New York.)-1. Pascal and his Editors. 2. The College of Physicians. 3. Albert Dürer. 4. The Founder of Norwich Cathedral. 5. Joseph de Maistre on Russia. 6. Froude's Cæsar. 7. The Weather and its Predictions. 8. Henry IV. of France. 9. The Submission of the Clergy. 10. Principles at Stake.

WESTMINSTER REVIEW, October, 1879. (New York.)-1. The Federation of the English Empire. 2. The Law of Real Property. 3. The Indian Mutiny. 4. Cavour and Lamarmora. 5. The Bohemians and Slovaks. 6. Prince Bismarck. 7. Lord Brougham. 8. India and our Colonial Empire.

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