622 THE PHYSIOLOGY OF REPRODUCTION 



The German rural population are apparently stiU unafiected, 

 while the British and Irish CathoUcs are almost so, since any 

 regulation of the married state is forbidden by their religion, 

 but in other Cathohc countries this prohibition does not appear 

 to be so strongly insisted on, and is often altogether ignored. 



To the political economist of sixty years ago this decline in 

 the production of children would have been regarded as the 

 fulfilment of an aspiration, but the modern economist takes a 

 different view. He beheves that a mere limitation of numbers 

 cannot be a factor in the improvement of social conditions, and 

 the student of Eugenics never tires of urging that the real 

 danger before society is not over-multipKcation, but multiphca- 

 tion of the unfit. As Sidney Webb has said : " Modern civihsa- 

 tion is faced by two awkward facts ; the production of children 

 is rapidly declining, and this decline is not uniform, but char- 

 acteristic of the more prudent, foreseeing, and restrained members 

 of the community. . . . The question is whether we shall be 

 able to turn round with sufficient sharpness and in time. For 

 we have unconsciously based so much of our social pohcy — so 

 many of our habits, traditions, prejudices, and behefs — on the 

 assumption that the growth of population is always to be 

 reckoned with, and even feared, that a genuine reahsation of 

 the contrary position will involve great changes. There are 

 thousands of men thinking themselves educated citizens to-day 

 to whose whole system of social and economic beliefs the dis- 

 covery 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 valuable 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 due proportion and best possible care of this 

 particular product is of far greater consequence to the nation, 

 than any other of its occupations." ^ 



1 Sidney Webb, loc. cit. Cf. also Wlietham, The Family and the 

 Nation, London, 1909. 



