Page:Women Wanted.djvu/344

 de la Population Française is calling on the French mothers for at least four children apiece during the next decade. Britain's Birth Rate Commission wants a million new babies from Scotland alone. The Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungs Politik, which is the society for increase of population organised at a great meeting in the Prussian Diet House, has entered its order with the German women for a million more babies annually for the next ten years. And that is the "birth politics" of men.

Then to the proposals of savants and scientists, sociologists and statesmen, military men and clergymen and kings, there has been entered a demurrer. Governments may propose, Increase and multiply. She-who-shall-dispose overlays their falling birth rate figures with the rising death rate statistics. And there is tragedy in her eyes: "What," she asks, "have you done with my children? The babies that I have given you, you have wasted them so!"

Is it not true? Even now along with the war's destruction of life on the most colossal scale known to history, children throughout the world are dying at a rate that equals the military losses. In England a hundred thousand babies under one year of age and a hundred thousand more that do not succeed in getting born are lost annually. In America our infant mortality is 300,000 a year. In Germany it is half a million babies who die annually. The economics of the situation to a woman is not obscure. Conservation of the children we already have, is the advice of the real specialist in repopulation. One