y
center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how
to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid
bringing into the world her eighth.

Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind
only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most
deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the
world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity
of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree,
a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to
eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race
and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened
public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy,
maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our
boasted civilization. So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions
of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and
barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many
high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful
facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so
necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem. Their
"hearts" are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate
action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first
superficial program that is advanced. Immediate action may sometimes be
worse than no action at all. The "warm heart" needs the balance of
the cool head. Much harm has been done in the world by those
too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that "something be done
at once."

They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to
subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking.
As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often
forgotten passage:

"The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole
it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or
harm. Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does
great evil. It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering,
it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious,
that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the
world, and this is entirely because ex