Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/533

Rh some form or another the maintenance which the father would have provided had he lived. Above all, we must encourage the thrifty, foreseeing, prudent and self-controlled parents to remove the check which, often unwillingly enough, they at present put on their natural instincts and love of children. We must make it easier for them to undertake family responsibilities. For instance, the arguments against the unlimited provision of medical attendance on the child-bearing mother and her children disappear. We may presently find the leader of the Opposition, if not the Prime Minister, advocating the municipal supply of milk to all infants, and a free meal on demand (as already provided by a far-seeing philanthropist at Paris) to mothers actually nursing their babies. We shall, indeed, have to face the problem of the systematic endowment of motherhood, and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable economic basis. The feeding of all the children at school appears in a new light, and we come, at a stride, appreciably nearer to that not very far distant article in the education code making obligatory in the time-table a new subject—namely, '12 to 1 p.m., table manners (materials provided).' There would be no greater encouragement to parentage in the best members of the middle and upper artisan classes than a great multiplication of maintenance scholarships for secondary, technical and university education, and the multiplication of tax-supported higher schools and colleges at nominal fees, or even free.

Such a revolution in the economic incidence of the burden of childbearing would leave the way open to the play of the best instincts of mankind. To the vast majority of women, and especially to those of fine type, the rearing of children would be the most attractive occupation, if it offered economic advantages equal to those, say, of school teaching or service in the post office. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated, and in no way honored by the state. Once the production of healthy, moral and intelligent citizens is revered as a social service and made the subject of deliberate praise and encouragement on the part of the government, it will, we may be sure, attract the best and most patriotic of the citizens. Once set free from the everwhelmingoverwhelming [sic] economic penalties with which it is at present visited, the rearing of a family may gradually be rendered part of the code of the ordinary citizen's morality. The natural repulsion to interference in marital relations will have free play. The mystic obligations of which the religious-minded feel the force will no longer be confronted by the dead wall of economic necessity. To the present writer it seems that only by some such 'sharp turn' in our way of dealing with these problems can we avoid race deterioration, if not race suicide.