wishes to be heard could afford to have the courage of everybody's
convictions. But already, in the middle classes, men limit their
families to the number they can support. They simply practise
responsible fatherhood, and the mothers and children are protected. On
what moral grounds this is to be condemned, no one has yet told us.

And as regards the effect of more stringent responsibility for
fatherhood upon the birth-rate, it must be replied, for the thousandth
time in this connection, that the question for a nation is not how many
babies are born, but how many survive. The idea of a baby is that it
shall grow up and become a citizen; if babies remained babies people
would soon cease to complain about the fall in the birth-rate. But, in
point of fact, a vast number of babies and children are unnecessarily
slain, and if we could suddenly arrest the whole of this slaughter, the
increase of population would become so formidable that everyone would
deplore the unmanageable height of the birth-rate. Its present fall is
quite incapable of arrest, and is perfectly compatible with as rapid an
increase of population as any one could desire. We must arrest the
destruction of so much of the present birth-rate, so that it means
nought for the future. By nothing else will this arrest be so
accelerated as by those very measures for making fatherhood more
responsible for the care of motherhood, which are here advocated. Let it
be freely granted that these measures will lower the birth-rate. Much
more will they lower the infant mortality and child death-rate, and
diminish the permanent damaging of vast multitudes of children who
escape actual destruction.

And now we can turn to those proposals which have lately been revived by
one or two popular writers in England, for the endowment of motherhood
by the State, leaving the fathers in peace to spend their earnings as
they please, whilst others support their children. Detailed criticism is
not needed, for the details to criticize are not forthcoming, and the
opinions on principles and on details of these imaginative writers are
never twice the same. It suffices that proposals such as these, apart
from their vagueness and their obvious impracticability in any form, are
directly condemned by the fundamental principle that a man shall be
responsible for his acts. The endowment of motherhood, as Mr. Wells
means it, is simply a phrase for making men responsible for their
neighbours' acts a