ambition, so a large family must
be avoided.

This desire to rise, and this dread too of incurring a responsibility
that will assuredly check individual progress were counselled by
Malthus, and resulted, and he said should result, in delayed marriage,
lest a man, in taking to himself a wife, take also to himself a family
he is unable to support.

But if this man can take to himself a wife without taking to himself a
family, what then?

Men and women, in this Colony at least, have discovered that conformity
to physiological law makes this possible.

A wife does not really add very much to a man's responsibility--it is
the family that adds to his expense, and taxes all his resources. It is
the doctor and the nurse, the food and the clothing, and the education
of the uninvited ones to his home, that use up all his earnings, that
keep him poor, or make him poorer.

Then there is one aspect of the question peculiar to the women
themselves. Women have come to dread maternity. This is part of a
general impatience with pain common to us all. Chloroform, and morphia,
and cocaine, and ethyl chloride have taught us that pain is an evil.

When there was no chance of relieving it, we anaesthetised ourselves and
each other with the thought that it was necessary, it was the will of
Providence, the cry of our nerves for succour.

Now it is an evil, and if we must submit we do so under protest. Women
now engage doctors on condition that chloroform will be administered as
soon as they scream, and they scream earlier in their labour at each
succeeding occasion.

Women are less than ever impressed with the sacredness and nobility of
maternity, and look upon it more and more as a period of martyrdom.
This attitude is in consonance with the crave for ease and luxury that
is beginning to possess us.

It is, however, no new phase in human experience. It characterised all
the civilisations of ancient times, at the height of their prosperity,
and was really the beginning of their decay.

Women with us are more eager to limit families than are their husbands.
They feel the burdens of a large family more. They are often heard to
declare that, with a large family around her, and limited funds at her
disposal with which to provide assistance, a woman is a slave. A large
number think this, and, if there is a way out of the difficulty, they
will follow that way. And they are not content to escape the hardships
of life. They want comforts