STATE, CHILD, AND PARENT.*

ONE of the " slogans " of the immediate post-War period was to the effect that you cannot build an Al Empire out of a C3 population. Alas, how few of the reforms which were intended to raise the population of England mentally and physically to the Al level have we seen carried out! National' Health Insurance is certainly working after a fashion, but in the matter of housing only about a quarter of the building that was said to be strictly necessary has actually been carried out ; the question of the feeble-minded has not been dealt with, while the education of English children is admittedly getting worse, not better. We apparently cannot afford to teach our children beyond the age of thirteen or fourteen ; even up till that age cheaper material and less qualified teachers are the order of the day, while as many as forty or fifty children at a time have to try to learn from a single teacher. It is possible for a professor to lecture to forty or fifty students, but it is not possible to teach children under thirteen in that way.

Yet it is difficult, attacking the problem from this side, to see what can be done ; just now we literally have not got the money either to build houses or to teach our children adequately ! What we can afford to each family of unemployment pay is not going even to feed or clothe them adequately, or to give them any of those little luxuries which we often lump together under the name of "advan- tages." But it has only just occurred to those who have viewed these things not only with natural pity but with disquiet for the future, that there is another way in which to approach the problem, not only the problem of education and housing, but the more delicate one of the standard of comfort and civilization within the home. That method of approach is by birth control, or what to many might be more acceptably known as Voluntary Parenthood.

Voluntary Parenthood is a principle which should parti- cularly appeal to the more conservative element of the country. The Spectator has always been among those who have held that the individual was responsible for the State, not the State for the individual ; it has always sought to inculcate into every citizen a sense of personal responsibility. So precious has seemed to us this principal of individual liability that we have been willing to condone many of the obvious faults of the present economic arrangement of the world because it has at least tended to foster this wide- spread, decentralized sense of self-reliance. In what sphere should this 'principle of individual responsibility more certainly be applied than to that of the child ? If (through proper medical channels) methods of birth control were known to everybody, consider what would be the consequences in the matter of the parents' respon- sibility. At present it is difficult to say anything to couples who, say, bring two or three imbecile or crippled children into the world ; it is also difficult to enforce the laws against the neglect of children or even against cruelty. The State, and, still more, public opinion, ought to be in a position to call couples whose children, because of their disease, because of their viciousness or inefficiency, have to be supported by other people, to account for bringing such children into the world. In the upper strata of society voluntary parenthood has now been in effect for thirty or forty years, and this sort of salutary public opinion does, in fact, work. A man and a woman have no business to bring into the world children to whom they cannot reasonably expect to give a fair start in life.

Mrs. Sanger, in her Pivot of Civilization,' gives considerable weight to this side of the question. She is an American, and the question has a special urgency in America, where in many States child labour is a terrible evil. As she says, "the brutal fact is that children are cheap " ; there are thousands of surplus children who are not cherished but exploited :—

" The child-labourer of one or two decades ago has become the shifting labourer of to-day, stunted, underfed, illiterate, unskilled, unorganized and unorganizable. He is the last person to be hired and the first to be fired."

Her account of the children who work in the beet fields and their mothers is appalling, as is the account of the unfortunate

• (1) The Pivot of Civilization. By Margaret sailor. London: Jonathan Cape. (6*. uet.)—(2) The liepo'rt of the Fifth Intffnational Ileo-Malthusidtt sad BM Control Conference: London-. Heinemann. [128. 6d. net.1—(3) Wise Wedlock. By Dr. G. Courtenay Beale. London Health Promotion, Ltd. Ns.] women—wives of the unskilled—who support their growing )

families by working night-shifts in factories. These are evils for which we have not, perhaps, exact parallels in England, but those who come into contact with the poor will agree that in a less degree similar evils do exist here. As to the

individualistic results of the theory of voluntaryiparenthood, Mrs. Sanger quotes Mr. Havelock Ellis :—

" To the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper, nothing seems simpler than to cure the present ills of child-rearing by setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of everything connected with the men of the future beyond the pleasure—if such it happens to be—of conceiving them, and the trouble of bearing them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the home, in a wholesome, economical and scientific manner. Nothing seems simpler, but from the fundamental psychological point of view nothing is falser. . ."

The Neo-Malthusian League issues the report of a Birth Control Conference2 in which delegates from all over the world spoke. The section dealing with India is particularly interesting. The . account of the child marriages and the

high infant mortality will give any imaginative reader an idea of the miseries entailed by the Hindu's reductio ad absurdum of the command to "increase and multiply."

There is a new edition of Wise Wedlock,3 a sensible book for

the newly married which we have noticed before. Its author, Dr. Courtenay Beale, says of the social aspect of voluntary parenthood :—

" It is surely a duty to have no more children than can be brought up in reasonable comfort, with decent educational facilities, in surroundings 'which will leave a fair image and not a blot upon their imaginations. To say it once more, the fundamental right of the unborn is to be well born, into an environment which will give them a chance. . . . It has been shown again and again, not only that a number of child-births exhausts and enfeebles the mother, but also that the later-born children of large families are- apt to prove of inferior calibre and stamina, and that the rate of infantile mortality among these late-corners is greatly in excess of that obtaining among the earlier-born ; indeed, as we have already said, wherever there is a very high birth-rate, it is balanced by an equally high infant death-rate. In the matter of human births - we are concerned with quality rather than quantity, and it is the worst of waste for children to be born only that they may fill little graves. . . ."

He also deals with the argument of those who object that for couples to limit their families is to interfere with the ways of nature, and points out that the same arguments might perfectly well be used against housing, clothing and teaching children. Here we think he does not perhaps plead strongly enough. If nature is to be appealed to, let the objector remember that the biological tendency is all the other way ; as organisms ascend in the biological scale so do the numbers of their offspring decrease and the survival rate of those offspring increase.