of the potential life he prevents, then, of course, the prevention of conception by married persons is also infanticide; the two things are on exactly the same level. When conception has taken place, then prevention is no longer possible, and a new life having been made, the destruction of that life would be criminal. Before conception no life exists to be destroyed; the seminal fluid is simply a secretion of the body; its fertilizing power is not a living thing, the non-use of which destroys life; the spermatozoa, the active fertilizing agents, are not living existences, and "they have been erroneously considered as proper animalculæ" (Carpenter). Life is not made until the male and female elements are united, and if this is prevented, either by abstention from intercourse among the unmarried, or by preventive intercourse among the married, life is not destroyed, because the life is not yet in existence.

Leaving objectors, let us look at the other side of the question. The system of preventive checks to population points us to the true pathway of safety; it is an immediate relief, and at once lightens the burden of poverty. Each married couple have it in their power to avoid poverty for themselves and for their children, by determining, when they enter on married life, that they will not produce a family larger than they can comfortably maintain thus they avoid the daily harass of domestic struggle; they rejoice over two healthy, robust, well-fed children, instead of mourning over seven frail, sickly, half-starved ones; they look forward to an old age of comfort and of respectability instead of one of painful dependence on a grudgingly given charity.

It is well worthy of notice that those who have pleaded for scientific checks to population have also been those who have been identified with the struggle for political and religious freedom; Carlile defended the use of such as advocated in his Every Woman's Book"-as follows:

There are four grounds on which my "Every Woman's Book" and its recommendation can be defended, and each of them in itself sufficient to justify the publication, and to make it meritorious. First-the political or national ground; which refers to the strength and wealth of the nation, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number of the people. Second - the local or commercial ground, or the ground of the wages of labor, and its supply in the

several trades and districts. Third the domestic or family ground, where the parents may think they have already children enough, and that more will be an injury. Fourth—the individual ground, where the state of health in the female, or her situation in life, will not justify a pregnancy; but where the abstinence from love becomes as great an evil. It has been a sort of common, but ill-judged maxim, that the strength and wealth of a nation consist in the number, the greatest number, of its people. The error in the judgment of the maxim is, in not taking into consideration whether that number be well or ill employed, well or ill fed, clothed and housed. If the number be well employed, well fed, well clothed, well housed, then the greatness of the number is in reality the wealth and strength of the nation. But if, on the other hand, the greatness of the number lessens the means of good employment, good living, clothing, and housing, then, as in England and Ireland, at this moment, under the present arrangements of government, aristocracy, religion, etc., the greatness of the number constitutes the weakness of the nation; and England and Ireland are both weak at this moment: weak, too evidently weak, from illemployed or unemployed members of the people. It is objected to me, that there is a sufficiency of natural checks already in existence, to remedy the evils of which I complain. My answer is, that these natural checks are the evil of which I do complain, and which I seek to remove by the substitution of a MORAL CHECK, that shall furnish no pain, no degradation, no discomfort, no evil of any kind. The existing natural or physical checks are disease or pestilence and famine. Surely it is to be desired that neither of these should exist. It is not wise, not parental, not kind, to breed children to such disasters. It is better that they should not be born, than be cut off prematurely by disease or famine, or struggle through a life of disease, poverty, and misery, a life of pain to themselves, and both a pain and burthen to their parents. The existing moral checks on numbers are war, and social arrangements, such as poverty, late marriages, celibacy, and the bad health which bad states of living produce; to which may be added, states of servitude, in which marriage is found inconvenient. These are all so many evils- all will say. It would be well to go on without war, and the time will come when wars will cease. In the question of trade, a government can do nothing more than remove impediments. It cannot increase the amount of trade beyond its natural demand. It cannot force trade to any permanent utility. Therefore I take it to be a clear point, that no change in government will do anything permanently for the relief of the present number of persons employed in surplus production. In limiting the number of children, as applicable to such a case, there is a double relief; an immediate relief to the parents, in not incurring expenses which cannot be well met, and a remote relief, in not bringing forth new laborers, when those existing cannot find employment. Besides, there is something cruel, wanton, base, and parentally unfeeling, in the principle that says: "I will bring all the children I can into the world, and if I cannot maintain them some other persons who care nothing about them must, or, which is the real alternative, they may starve."

20. THE DESIRE TO RESTRICT FERTILITY1

The desire to keep fertility within such limits as each one for himself deems reasonable has generally been characteristic of a decadent state of society. It must not be assumed to have had its origin in modern times, for the contrary is thoroughly well established by history; nor is it, in modern times, peculiar to the State into whose social condition, in respect of population, it has been our special duty to inquire. Though we have found that the free play given to this desire has been the main factor in the decline of birth rate in New South Wales, it must be borne in mind that in all the countries, including France, England, and the United States, where a decline of natural increase due to scarcity of births has been studied, the prominence of the same factor has been recognized.

Witnesses one after another, in the course of this inquiry, have testified to the exercise of this desire; they have also referred to the readiness, and even spontaneity, of married people in admitting a deliberate restriction in the number of their children by recourse to artificial checks. In addition to this, we recognize that there may be a certain number of instances in which the restraint of natural impulse is effective in marriage as well as in postponing marriage. The reason almost invariably given by people for restricting procreation is that they cannot conveniently afford to rear more than a certain number of children. In some instances we believe the people are sincere in stating this as their reason; and that they honestly, though mistakenly, believe want of adequate means to be a sufficient justification for interference with the course of nature. The witnesses themselves, however, suggest that, in the majority of cases, this is not the true reason; they say that there are:

1. An unwillingness to submit to the strain and worry of children;

2. A dislike of the interference with pleasure and comfort involved in childbearing and childrearing ;

1 From the Report of the Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth Rate and on the Mortality of Infants in New South Wales, Sydney, 1904, Vol. I, pp. 16–17.

3. A desire to avoid the actual physical discomfort of gestation, parturition, and lactation; and

4. A love of luxury and of social pleasures, which is increasing. It will be seen that the reasons given for resorting to limitation have one element in common, namely, selfishness. They are, in fact, indicative of the desire of the individual to avoid his obligations to the community; and they serve to exemplify the observation that "the effort of the race towards its increase in numbers is in inverse ratio to the effort of the individual towards his personal development." They are the same kind of reasons as might be expected to be given in any community where the phenomenon of the voluntary limitation of the size of families is observed.

The question, however, has presented itself to us, why, during the last twenty years or so, the avoidance of procreation in New South Wales should have become so prevalent as to materially reduce the birth rate. The answer seems to us to be, not so much that the future prospects for the rising generation are unfavorable, as some have suggested; but that the restraints which previously operated against the desire to regulate the size of families have lately been either weakened or removed. These restraints, we consider, have been mainly of two kinds: first, religious feeling, which, we think, formerly actuated a larger proportion of the people; and, second, ignorance of the means of accomplishing the desire. In regard to the latter we see that, during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a wave of popular feeling spread over a great part of the civilized world, favorable to the individual control of the size of families; and with it there has been a general diffusion of the knowledge of methods by which restriction might be accomplished which previously was wanting. The history of this movement is matter of common knowledge. Despite Malthus's repudiation, early in the century, of artificial checks to the growth of population, these checks soon had their advocates; and, towards the end of the third quarter of the century, a prominent school of writers on social subjects

1 It is worthy of note that the members of the Commission were all - ED.

men.

arose, with Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant as its chief exponents, who thought they saw in the limitation of families a means of alleviating the burdens of poverty. Since then the followers of this school have availed themselves, in times and places of prosperity and plenty, of the instructions intended by the NeoMalthusians only for the very poor, with the result that marriage rates and birth rates have diverged in many parts of the world. This propaganda of limitation of families was followed by a traffic in the materials used for the purpose of prevention, which, in its turn, has encouraged the popular tendency, and brought facilities for prevention within the knowledge and reach of a very large proportion of the community. In due course these doctrines and this branch of commerce established themselves in Australia, and their introduction and extension have been concomitant with the commencement and acceleration of the decline of the birth rate.

21. THE ETHICS OF NEO-MALTHUSIANISM1

The second great channel 2 through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated classes of all countries — and it must be remembered that, in this matter at all events, all classes are gradually beginning to become educated of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired. It is no longer permissible to discuss the validity of this control, for it is an accomplished fact and has become a part of our modern morality. "If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority of the whole educated class of the nation," as Sidney Webb rightly puts it, "we must assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality." 3

1 By Havelock Ellis. Adapted from Sex in Relation to Society, pp. 588-593. F. A. Davis Company, Philadelphia, 1913.

2 The first is "the growing sense of sexual responsibility among wonen as well as men."— ED.

a Sidney Webb, Popular Science Monthly, 1906, p. 526 (previously published in the London Times, October 11, and October 16, 1906).