Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/532

528 To four-fifths of all the households in the land each succeeding baby means the probability of there being less food, less clothing, less house room, less recreation and less opportunity for advancement for every member of the family. Similar considerations appeal even more strongly to a majority of the remaining 20 per cent, of the population, who make up the 'middle' and professional classes. Their higher standard of life, with its requirements in the way of culture and refinement, and with the long and expensive education which it demands for their children, makes the advent even of a third or fourth child—to say nothing of the possibility of a family of eight or twelve—a burden far more psychologically depressing than that of the wage-earner. In order that a due number of children may be born, and that they may be born rather of the self-controlled and foreseeing members of each class than of those who are reckless or improvident, we must alter the balance of considerations in favor of the child producing family.

The question is whether we shall be able to turn round with sufficient sharpness and in time. For we have unconsciously based so much of our social policy—so many of our habits, traditions, prejudices and beliefs—on the assumption that the growth of population is always to be reckoned with, and even feared, that a genuine realization of the contrary position will involve great changes. There are thousands of men thinking themselves educated citizens to-day to whose whole system of social and economic beliefs the discovery will be as subversive as was that announced by Copernicus. We may at last understand what the modern economist means when he tells us that the most valuable of the year's crops, as it is the most costly, is not the wheat harvest or the lambing, but the year's quota of adolescent young men and women enlisted in the productive service of the community; and that the clue production and best possible care of this particular product is of far greater consequence to the nation than any other of its occupations. Infant mortality, for instance—that terrible and quite needless slaughter within the first twelve months of one seventh of all the babies that are born—is already appealing to us in a new way, though it is no greater than it was a generation ago. We shall suddenly remember, too, that one-third of all the paupers are young children; and we may then realize that it is, to the community, of far more consequence how it shall bring up this quarter of a million children over whom it has complete power than the exact degree of hardness with which it may choose to treat the adults. Instead of turning out the children to tramp with the father or beg with the mother, whenever these choose to take their discharge from the workhouse, which is the invariable practise to-day, we should rather jump at the chance of 'adopting' these unfortunate beings in order to make worthy citizens of them. Half of the young paupers, moreover, are widows' children, bereft of the breadwinner. For them the community will have to arrange to continue in