12 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



tion 'children producer' (proletarius) had been an 

 honor for the Roman?"" 



In our modern Rooseveltian campaign against 

 race suicide there is evidently an expression of fear 

 lest the experience of these great civilizations of 

 antiquity be ours. Like Polybius, the statesmen and 

 scholars of to-day, in overwhelming majority, regard 

 the evil as being essentially a moral one. They attrib- 

 ute the decline in the birth-rate among the classes en- 

 dowed with economic comfort, education, and leisure 

 to an unwillingness to bear the responsibilities of 

 parenthood. Personally, however, I cannot accept 

 this explanation of the phenomenon. Presumptuous 

 though it may be, I cannot escape the conviction that, 

 while there are undoubtedly — as in all ages — many 

 persons of whom the charge is true, the decline in the 

 birth-rate is not due in any measurable degree to 

 choice. The number of women unwilling to bear 

 children is probably not greater than the number of 

 women unable to bear children — the yearning Han- 

 nahs of "sorrowful spirit." There are tens of thou- 

 sands of women who feel that to live and die childless 

 is humiliating failure, who mourn bitterly that they 

 cannot know 



" A mother's pleasure in her infant race ; 

 But friendless and forlorn, alive descend 

 Into the dreary mansions of the dead."* 



* Sophocles, Antigone. 



