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526 moral indignation, real or simulated. Such a judgment appears to the present writer both irrelevant and futile. It is impossible, as Burke has taught us, to draw an indictment against a whole nation. If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority of the whole educated class of the nation, we must assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality. They may be intellectually mistaken, but they are not doing what they feel to be wrong. Assuming, as I think we may, that no injury to physical health is necessarily involved—aware, on the contrary, that the result is to spare the wife from an onerous and even dangerous illness, for which in the vast majority of homes no adequate provision in the way of medical attendance, nursing, privacy, rest and freedom from worry can possibly be made—it is, to say the least of it, difficult on any rationalist morality to formulate any blame of a married couple for the deliberate regulation of their family according to their means and opportunities. Apart from some mystic idea of marriage as a 'sacrament,' or, at any rate, as a divinely instituted relation with peculiar religious obligations for which utilitarian reasons can not be given, it does not seem easy to argue that prudent regulation differs essentially from deliberate celibacy from prudential motives. If, as we have for generations been taught by the economists, it is one of the primary obligations of the individual to maintain himself and his family in accordance with his social position and, if possible, to improve that position, the deliberate restriction of his responsibilities within the means which he has of fulfilling them can hardly be counted otherwise than as for righteousness. And when we pass from obligations of the 'self-regarding' class to the wider conception of duty to the community, the ground for blame is, to the ordinary citizen, no more clear. A generation ago, the economists, and, still more, the 'enlightened public opinion' that caught up their words, would have seen in this progressive limitation of population, whether or not it had their approval, the compensating advantage of an uplifting of the economic conditions of the lowest grade of laborers. At any rate, it would have been said, the poorest will thereby be saved from starvation and famine. To those who still believe in the political economy of Ricardo, Nassau Senior, Cairnes and Fawcett—to those, in fact, who still adhere to an industrial system based exclusively on the pecuniary self-interest of the individual and on unshackled freedom of competition—this reasoning must appear as valid to-day as it did a generation ago.

To the present writer the situation appears in a graver light. More accurate knowledge of economic processes denies to this generation the consolation which the 'Early Victorian' economists found in the limitation of population. No such limitation of numbers prevents the lowest grade of workers, if exposed to unfettered individual