THE UNEMPLOYED AND THE BIRTH-RATE
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] SIR,—In your remarks about the disparity between wages and unemployed payments in your last issue, you made a non- committal reference to the question of limitation of family. This surely is the crucial question and one that is only too often overlooked. We are invited to show our practical sympathy with the man who on a small wage struggles along under the burden of half a dozen or more children. But is not our sympathy often misplaced? Is he in having this large family actuated by a high motive ? I fear not. On the contrary, his conduct has been one of irresponsibility and recklessness. I have never been able to see why such a man is not condemned by public opinion for bringing into the world more children than he can ever hope to make adequate provision for.
Is it reasonable to expect the taxpayer to shoulder the burden of other people's reckless orgy of propagation ? Only too often the average taxpayer is so bled that he cannot afford more than one or two children if he is to give them a decent start in life.
A Hitler or a Mussolini directly encourages large families, be they self-supporting or not ; he has his special reasons for doing so—reasons which menace the peace of the world. So long as Britain held its all-important start in industry over other coun- tries and remained the workshops of the world, a rising birth- rate was a natural consequence. But the position today is vastly different. We must for the future content ourselves with a smaller population and must devise some means of restraining the philoprogenitive impulses of our less responsible fellow-citizens for whom the present state of affairs is utterly
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