band is able to provide comfortably for both.

If he is not, the wife can work, and their joint earnings will keep them
from want. But, if one of the partners has not only to give herself up
to child-bearing, and thus cease to earn, but also bring another into
the home that will monopolise all her time, attention, and energy, and a
good deal of its father's earnings, how will they fare?

If a man's wages has to be divided between two, then between three, then
four, six, eight, ten, while all the time that wages is not increasing,
have we not a direct cause of poverty, and, moreover, is not that cause
first in time and importance?

Later on in the history of the family their poverty will become a cause
of an increase in the children born to them. At first they may struggle
to prevent an increase, but, when they are in the depths of hopeless
poverty, they will abandon themselves to despair.

Could they have had born to them only one, or two, or three, during
their early married life, they might not only have escaped want, but
later in life may have had others born to them, without either their
little ones or themselves feeling the pinch of poverty.

It must be remembered in this connection that fecundity and sexual
activity are not convertible terms.

It is certainly not true to say that the greater the fecundity of the
people the stronger their sexual instinct, or the greater the sexual
exercise.

A high fecundity does not depend on an inordinate sexual activity.

Fecundity depends on the child-bearing capacity of each female, and a
sexual union at an appropriate time once in two years between puberty
and the catamenia is compatible with the highest possible fecundity.

It would be quite illogical, and inconsistent with physiological facts,
to aver that, were the poor less given to indulge the pleasures of
sense, their fecundity would be modified in an appreciable degree.

CHAPTER VI.

ETHICS OF PREVENTION.

_Fertility the law of life.--Man interprets and controls this
law.--Marriage law necessary to fix paternal responsibility.--Malthus's
high ideal.--If prudence the motive, continence and celibacy violate no
law.--Post-nuptial intermittent restraint.--Ethics of prevention judged
by consequences.--When procreation is a good and when an
evil.--Oligantrophy.--Artificial checks are physiological sins._

"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He
him, male and female create