PHYSICAL DEGENERACY OR RACE SUICIDE? 529 



some form or another the maintenance which the father would have 

 provided had he lived. Above all, we must encourage the thrifty, fore- 

 seeing, prudent and self-controlled parents to remove the check which, 

 often unwillingly enough, they at present put on their natural instincts 

 and love of children. We must make it easier for them to undertake 

 family responsibilities. For instance, the arguments against the un- 

 limited provision of medical attendance on the child-bearing mother 

 and her children disappear. We may presently find the leader of the 

 Opposition, if not the Prime Minister, advocating the municipal supply 

 of milk to all infants, and a free meal on demand (as already provided 

 by a far-seeing philanthropist at Paris) to mothers actually nursing 

 their babies. We shall, indeed, have to face the problem of the sys- 

 tematic endowment of motherhood, and place this most indispensable 

 of all professions upon an honorable economic basis. The feeding of 

 all the children at school appears in a new light, and we come, at a 

 stride, appreciably nearer to that not very far distant article in the 

 education code making obligatory in the time-table a new subject — 

 namely, * 12 to 1 p.m., table manners (materials provided).' There 

 would be no greater encouragement to parentage in the best members 

 of the middle and upper artisan classes than a great multiplication of 

 maintenance scholarships for secondary, technical and university educa- 

 tion, and the multiplication of tax-supported higher schools and colleges 

 at nominal fees, or even free. 



Such a revolution in the economic incidence of the burden of child- 

 bearing would leave the way open to the play of the best instincts of 

 mankind. To the vast majority of women, and especially to those of 

 fine type, the rearing of children would be the most attractive occupa- 

 tion, if it offered economic advantages equal to those, say, of school 

 teaching or service in the post office. At present it is ignored as an 

 occupation, unremunerated, and in no way honored by the state. Once 

 the production of healthy, moral and intelligent citizens is revered as a 

 social service and made the subject of deliberate praise and encourage- 

 ment on the part of the government, it will, we may be sure, attract 

 the best and most patriotic of the citizens. Once set free from the 

 everwhelming economic penalties with which it is at present visited, the 

 rearing of a family may gradually be rendered part of the code of the 

 ordinary citizen's morality. The natural repulsion to interference in 

 marital relations will have free play. The mystic obligations of which 

 the religious-minded feel the force will no longer be confronted by the 

 dead wall of economic necessity. To the present writer it seems that 

 only by some such ' sharp turn ' in our way of dealing with these prob- 

 lems can we avoid race deterioration, if not race suicide. 



VOL. lxix. — 34. 



