On
what moral grounds this is to be condemned, no one has yet told us.
And as regards the effect of more stringent responsibility for
fatherhood upon the birth-rate, it must be replied, for the thousandth
time in this connection, that the question for a nation is not how many
babies are born, but how many survive. The idea of a baby is that it
shall grow up and become a citizen; if babies remained babies people
would soon cease to complain about the fall in the birth-rate. But, in
point of fact, a vast number of babies and children are unnecessarily
slain, and if we could suddenly arrest the whole of this slaughter, the
increase of population would become so formidable that everyone would
deplore the unmanageable height of the birth-rate. Its present fall is
quite incapable of arrest, and is perfectly compatible with as rapid an
increase of population as any one could desire. We must arrest the
destruction of so much of the present birth-rate, so that it means
nought for the future. By nothing else will this arrest be so
accelerated as by those very measures for making fatherhood more
responsible for the care of motherhood, which are here advocated. Let it
be freely granted that these measures will lower the birth-rate. Much
more will they lower the infant mortality and child death-rate, and
diminish the permanent damaging of vast multitudes of children who
escape actual destruction.
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