se, some very extensive
and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard system
of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discretions, no longer
secures a young population numerous enough or good enough for the
growing needs and possibilities of our Empire. Statecraft sits weaving
splendid garments, no doubt, but with a puny, ugly, insufficient baby in
the cradle.

No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present question
for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and sits at
every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional except the
improvement of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me if
we were improving the race at all! Splendid and beautiful and courageous
people must come together and have children, women with their fine
senses and glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels
them to be celibate, compels them to be childless and useless, or to
bear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous
pressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that,
and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that they should seem, in
seeking to save the family, to threaten its existence. It is as if
a party of pigmies in a not too capacious room had been joined by a
carnivorous giant--and decided to go on living happily by cutting him
dead....

The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it can
get the best possible increase under the best possible conditions.
I became more and more convinced that the independent family unit
of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and owner of the
children, in which all are dependent upon him, subordinated to his
enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up or down, does not
supply anything like the best conceivable conditions. We want to
modernise the family footing altogether. An enormous premium both in
pleasure and competitive efficiency is put upon voluntary childlessness,
and enormous inducements are held out to women to subordinate
instinctive and selective preferences to social and material
considerations.

The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition of
the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is changing,
secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything is
changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most among
just the most efficient and active and best adapted classes in t