528 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



To four-fifths of all the households in the land each succeeding baby 

 means the probability of there being less food, less clothing, less house 

 room, less recreation and less opportunity for advancement for every 

 member of the family. Similar considerations appeal even more 

 strongly to a majority of the remaining 20 per cent, of the population, 

 who make up the 'middle' and professional classes. Their higher 

 standard of life, with its requirements in the way of culture and refine- 

 ment, and with the long and expensive education which it demands for 

 their children, makes the advent even of a third or fourth child — to 

 say nothing of the possibility of a family of eight or twelve — a burden 

 far more psychologically depressing than that of the wage-earner. In 

 order that a due number of children may be born, and that they may 

 be born rather of the self-controlled and foreseeing members of each 

 class than of those who are reckless or improvident, we must alter the 

 balance of considerations in favor of the child producing family. 



The question is whether we shall be able to turn round with suffi- 

 cient sharpness and in time. For we have unconsciously based so much 

 of our social policy — so many of our habits, traditions, prejudices 

 and beliefs — on the assumption that the growth of population is always 

 to be reckoned with, and even feared, that a genuine realization of the 

 contrary position will involve great changes. There are thousands of 

 men thinking themselves educated citizens to-day to whose whole sys- 

 tem of social and economic beliefs the discovery will be as subversive 

 as was that announced by Copernicus. We may at last understand 

 what the modern economist means when he tells us that the most valu- 

 able of the year's crops, as it is the most costly, is not the wheat harvest 

 or the lambing, but the year's quota of adolescent young men and women 

 enlisted in the productive service of the community; and that the clue 

 production and best possible care of this particular product is of far 

 greater consequence to the nation than any other of its occupations. 

 Infant mortality, for instance — that terrible and quite needless 

 slaughter within the first twelve months of one seventh of all the babies 

 that are born — is already appealing to us in a new way, though it is no 

 greater than it was a generation ago. We shall suddenly remember, 

 too, that one- third of all the paupers are young children; and we may 

 then realize that it is, to the community, of far more consequence how 

 it shall bring up this quarter of a million children over whom it has 

 complete power than the exact degree of hardness with which it may 

 choose to treat the adults. Instead of turning out the children to 

 tramp with the father or beg with the mother, whenever these choose to 

 take their discharge from the workhouse, which is the invariable prac- 

 tise to-day, we should rather jump at the chance of ' adopting ' these 

 unfortunate beings in order to make worthy citizens of them. Half of 

 the young paupers, moreover, are widows' children, bereft of the bread- 

 winner. For them the community will have to arrange to continue in 



