tion, from the horrors of 'sweating' or the terrors of prolonged lack of employment. On the other hand, with factory acts and trade union 'collective bargaining' maintaining a deliberately fixed national minimum, the limitation of numbers, however prudent it may be in individual instances, is, from the national standpoint, seen to be economically as unnecessary as it is proved to be futile even for the purposes for which McCulloch and Mill, Cairnes and Fawcett so ardently desired it.
Nor can we look forward, even if we wished to do so, to the vacuum remaining unfilled. It is, as all experience proves, impossible to exclude the alien immigrant. Moreover, there are in Great Britain, as in all other countries, a sufficient number of persons to whom the prudential considerations affecting the others will not appeal, or will appeal less strongly. In Great Britain at this moment, when half, or perhaps two thirds, of all the married people are regulating their families, children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and the Polish, Russian and German Jews, on the one hand, and to the thriftless and irresponsible—largely the casual laborers and the other denizens of the one-roomed tenements of our great cities—on the other. This particular 25 per cent, of our population, as Professor Karl Pearson keeps warning us, is producing 50 per cent, of our children. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews. Finally, there are signs that even these races are becoming influenced. The ultimate future of these islands may be to the Chinese.
The conclusion which the present writer draws from the investigation is, however, one of hope, not of despair. It is something to discover the cause of the phenomenon. Moreover, the cause is one that we can counteract. If the decline in the birth rate had been due to physical degeneracy, whether brought about by 'urbanization' or otherwise, we should not have known how to cope with it. But a deliberately volitional interference, due chiefly to economic motives, can at any moment be influenced partly by a mere alteration of the economic conditions, partly by the opportunity for the play of the other motives which will be thereby afforded.
What seems indispensable and urgent is to alter the economic incidence of child-bearing. Under the present social conditions the birth of children in households maintained on less than three pounds a week (and these form four fifths of the nation) is attended by almost penal consequences. The wife is incapacitated for some months from earning money. For a few weeks she is subject to a painful illness, with some risk. The husband has to provide a lump sum for the necessary medical attendance and domestic service. But this is not all. The parents know that for the next fourteen years they will have to dock themselves and their other children of luxuries and even of some of the necessaries of life, just because there will be another mouth to feed.
