BABIES AND BOMBS
Sm,—The Dean of Christ's College, Cambridge (one expected better things from Cambridge), advocates "population control," evidently meaning restriction, because if there are too many children they will get playing with atom bombs: or as he puts it, "of the factors which favour war one of the most potent is the pressure of increasing popula- tion." I marvel that dislike and fear of children can go to such lengths. It is true that I remember with mixed feelings the occasions when I have had to look after two or three children ; and if a scrutiny were made of their and of my behaviour on those occasions, I would not come well out of it. Nevertheless, the abundance or scarcity of children is the best barometer of human happiness, and restriction of them is the last and final sexual perversion which, if it becomes prevalent, will finish us. Of the causes leading to murder, or on a large scale to war, none would obtain more instant readiness from all of us to fight against whatever odds, than an attempt to interfere in this respect with the rights of our married friends, or the rights of our friends to marry each other if they want to.
As for the atom bomb, that is a very minor risk in comparison. Even allowing for the logarithmic acceleration of human ingenuity, the invention and use of new poisons and explosives cannot, at worst, exceed the horror of a childless world (read, e.g., about Mr. H. G. Wells' megalotherium on Rampole Island), and in the ordinary probabilities of the case will only wipe out the towns and drive the survivors of us into a neo-primitive existence in scattered hamlets, where the more powerfully destructive gadgets cannot be made.—I am, Sir, your faithfully,
Guisborough. EDWARD PEASE.
SIR,—In last week's Spectator Professor Marshall suggested that no nation with a declining birth-rate had ever started an aggressive war, but surely Germany is a case in point. She started the 1914-18 war with an indisputably falling rate (from 1906 to 1910 the rate was 31.3, from 1911 to 1914 it was 27.4). Hitler's desperate attempts to raise the birth rate in the decade before the last war (it had fallen to 16 in 1931) were only spasmodically successful, and changes in birth-rate can only be judged satisfactorily by variations over a considerable period of years. So judged Germany had still a falling rate.—I am, Sir, yours faithfully,
MARGARET SPARROW.
New Barn, Ferry Hinksey, Oxford.
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