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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
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