le
for a man with three hundred pounds a year. His newspapers, which are
supported by advertisers and financiers, in order to hide the obvious
injustice of this one-man-fight against the allied forces of property,
din in his ears that his one grievance is local taxation, his one
remedy "to keep down the rates"--the "rates" which do at least repair
his roadway, police his streets, give him open spaces for his babies
and help to educate his children, and which, moreover, constitute a
burthen he might by a little intelligent political action shift quite
easily from his own shoulders to the broad support of capital and
land.

If the children of the decent skilled artisan and middle-class suffer
less obviously than the poorer sort of children, assuredly the parents
in wearing anxiety, in toil and limitation and disappointment, suffer
more. And in less intense and dramatic, but perhaps even more
melancholy ways, the children of this class do suffer. They do not die
so abundantly in infancy, but they grow up, too many of them, to
shabby and limited lives; in Britain they are still, as a class,
extraordinarily ill educated--many of them still go to incompetent,
understaffed and ill-equipped private adventure schools--they are sent
into business prematurely, often at fourteen or fifteen, they become
mechanical "respectable" drudges in processes they do not understand.
They may escape want and squalor for a while, perhaps, but they cannot
escape narrowness and limitation and a cramped and anxious life. If
they get to anything better than that, it is chiefly through almost
heroic parental effort and sacrifice.

The plain fact is that the better middle-class parents serve the State
in this matter of child-rearing, the less is their reward, the less is
their security, the greater their toil and anxiety. Is it any wonder
then that throughout this more comfortable but more refined and
exacting class, the skilled artisan and middle-class, there goes on
something even more disastrous, from the point of view of the State,
than the squalor, despair and neglect of the lower levels, and that is
a very evident strike against parentage? While the very poor continue
to have many children who die or grow up undersized, crippled or
half-civilized, the middle mass, which _can_ contrive with a struggle
and sacrifice to rear fairly well-grown and well-equipped offspring,
which has a conscience for the well-being and happiness of the young,
manif