[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,--Mr..R. K Harrod, in
his recent article in The Spectator on the Population Problem, suggests that people who will not be persuaded to have large families themselves should be given a sentimental bias towards • legislation and social reform which will encourage other people .to have them. The idea is excellent, but he backs it with an example and a
threat which are not so good. .
If things get much worse, he says, panic may set ini primitive instincts' of self-preservation will surge up, and then we may expect a reign of intolerance and persecution• beside which the present Nazi treatment of Jews will went polite and gentle."• Does he mean that we dwindling whites will start to kill off-the blacks and yellows ? If'so the simile of Italians and Ethiops would have been more apt. But his reference to Nazis and Jews implies some domestic sort of persecution. Who, in that case, will persecute whom,
and how ? • - • •
• Will parents of six hound into exile parents of a paltry two or less ? Will they cut off their means of liVelihood or otherwise goad them to suicide ? Of course they Might intern them until they had bred the right number, but that would be comparatively gentle and polite. What exact form of-persecution by the paniestricken dOes Mr. Harrod' envisage as being uscd to encourage procreation ? - As to the example, he writes with affectionate regret of the vanished mid-Victorian view whereby a family of a dozen or twenty was considered the greatest pride and glory of man." (The italics are mine.) A man. may be proud of his children and glad that he has a lot of them. My own father, mid- Victorian to the core, often in my hearing cursed the day that I, the last of five, was born, and therefore presumably that on which he begot me ; but that may have been on account of quality rather than quantity, and he may have been an exception. Mothers, who have all the suffering and nine-tenths of the bother, may have legitimate cause to boast of numbers, but if there really were Victorian fathers who preened themselves on the multitudie of their progeny; they were disgusting fellows and no more laudable than those who bragged of being two-bottle men. Both distinctions were the result of self-indulgence rather than devotion to duty, and the second was physically by far the more remarkable.
I am not carping, and I honestly think Mr. Harrod's idea a good one. But two weak links in so short a chain of reasoning may shake the confidence of a less converted critic in the whole.: For that reason I hope that the example of the mid-Victorian. papa and the threat, . which can easily be construed as one of a rather fantastic philogenitive persecution, will be rein- forced with other arguments more likely to convince a sceptiCal and irreverent generation..—Vours faithfully,
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