hey believe to be
urgently needed in the interests of the community.'[3] They themselves
decline to bear the burden of parentage, but they are ready to teach
the poor the best way of bearing the burden. Unconscious that they
themselves, the victims of {16} race-weariness and of selfishness, are
in direst need of some mission among them that would quicken them to
life, they organise missions to quicken others. The dead in the valley
of the Dry Bones organise to reform Jerusalem! Not all the earth can
present a stranger spectacle than this--the citizens of the West Ends,
who have sacrificed the race to their own ease, solicitous over keeping
alive the children of the miserable in the slums! Their own gardens
and nurseries are empty; but they would keep the children alive in
airless, foetid closes. Thus would they condone. But it is no boon to
the race to keep alive the children of the diseased and of the unfit;
nor is it a kindness to these children to ensure that they shall grow
into the consciousness of the misery into which they are born. The
generations of the healthy and the clean have been sacrificed on the
altar of selfishness, and no service at any other altar can ever atone.

{17}

V

But it might have been worse with the race than it is even to-day, for
this obsession of racial suicide might have possessed the nation sooner
than it did; and if it had, then we would truly have been poor indeed.
For Sir Walter Scott was the seventh child of his parents; and it is as
certain as most human surmisings, that if the ideal of life which
to-day dominates the professional classes in Scotland, had, in the year
1771, found sway in the College Wynd of Edinburgh, Walter Scott would
never have been born. John Wesley was one of nineteen children:
fortunately for the race, the gospel of the salvation of men through
racial limitation had not yet gained devotees in that vicarage where
the children were taught to cry quietly! Alfred Tennyson was the third
of seven sons, and if yesterday were as to-day, then 'In Memoriam'
would never have been written. But now, alas! the door {18} is shut
against the Walter Scotts and Wesleys of the future.

It is unnecessary to multiply instances. Any one can see how
impoverished the race would have been, and how different the history of
the world, if the door by which mighty souls become incarnate had been
shut by the generations of the past. One has but to think of the world
w