104 A BOOK-LOVER S HOLIDAYS 



birth-rate are reversed. A race is worthless and 

 contemptible if its men cease to be willing and 

 able to work hard and, at need, to fight hard, 

 and if its women cease to breed freely. I am 

 not speaking of pauper families with excessive 

 numbers of ill-nourished and badly brought up 

 children; I am well aware that, like most wise 

 and good principles, this which I advocate can 

 be carried to a mischievous excess; but it 

 nevertheless remains true that voluntary steril 

 ity among married men and women of good 

 life is, even more than military or physical 

 cowardice in the ordinary man, the capital 

 sin of civilization, whether in France or Scan 

 dinavia, New England or New Zealand. If 

 the best classes do not reproduce themselves 

 the nation will of course go down; for the real 

 question is encouraging the fit, and discouraging 

 the unfit, to survive. When the ordinary decent 

 man does not understand that to marry the 

 woman he loves, as early as he can, is the most 

 desirable of all goals, the most successful of all 

 forms of life entitled to be called really success 

 ful; when the ordinary woman does not under 

 stand that all other forms of life are but make 

 shift and starveling substitutes for the life of 

 the happy wife, the mother of a fair-sized 

 family of healthy children; then the state is 



