Sm,—Miss Rose Macaulay in her letter asks for an explanation
of the flourishing of the " creative arts " in France compared with the French in Canada " so barren and so stagnant." The first task is to subdue the wilderness and make it fruitful: thereafter the era of culture and the arts. What Miss Macaulay should ponder is the spectacle, unpre- cedented in history, of a race that lost a Dominion on the battlefield steadily regaining it in the cradle. The " creative arts," so gratifying to Miss Macaulay, have culminated in the Stavisky scandal, in the Maginot Line, iv a Press bought by the enemy ; in an atmosphere where truth was no longer honoured; in the Lavals and Darlans that hurled France into the abyss. This is what Miss Macaulay dignifies as " so intellectually alive "! But the startling sentence of Miss Macaulay is this: " And is The Madonna with the Child in her arms (one child) really relevant to the production of large families? " The French agreed with Miss Macaulay. The Times of January ,6th, 1939, in an article on The Family in France, recorded an investigation of 22,810 married working men in a large provincial town. Of these 64 per cent. had no children, zo per cent. one child, to per cent. two and only 3 per cent. had three or more. A nation such as that no longer believed in life. But I am certain that the zo eer cent. with the one child never prided themselves on the example of the Madonna with one child in her arms. It was reserved for Miss Macaulay to suggest that! Miss Macaulay should consider that the artist places the Child in the Madonna's arms as the symbol of the incarnation; that the incarnation is not an isolated event but a continuous process, and that those whose precept now is: "Be unfruitful, decrease and degenerate " are frustrating the purpose of God. Of which history records but one end.—Yours, &c.
NORMAN kiCLEAN.
P.S.—In the original article I suggested that if the neo-malthusians had been a little earlier there would have been no Winston Churchill. That is a fascinating line of research. How dull journalism would be without Miss Ross Macaulay, but there would have been no Rose Macaulay if the Madonna with one child had been the rule of life. The Rev. John Macaulay was ordained Minister of South Uist in 1745 and died minister of Cardross in 1789, and had a family of i3 children, of whom Zachary (the father of Lord Macaulay) was the 9th. What an escape history had and what an escape literature! Surely Miss Rose Macaulay must believe in the large family after that.
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