It has already crept into social legislation
to the extent of thirty shillings.
I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in the past two decades
more than any other it is this: that the supply of children is falling
off in the modern State; that births, and particularly good-quality
births, are not abundant enough; that the birth-rate, and particularly
the good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below the needs of our future.
If no one else has said a word about this important matter, ex-President
Roosevelt would have sufficed to shout it to the ends of the earth.
Every civilised community is drifting towards "race-suicide" as Rome
drifted into "race-suicide" at the climax of her empire.
Well, it is absurd to go on building up a civilisation with a dwindling
supply of babies in the cradles--and these not of the best possible
sort--and so I suppose there is hardly an intelligent person in the
English-speaking communities who has not thought of some possible
remedy--from the naive scoldings of Mr. Roosevelt and the more stolid of
the periodicals to sane and intelligible legislative projects.
The reasons for the fall in the birth-rate are obvious enough. It is a
necessary consequence of the individualistic competition of modern life.
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