But if we desire to maintain the population
at its present figure, or to increase it, we must take immediate
steps to induce people of moderate means to marry earlier and to
have more children. There is less urgency in the case of the very
poor and the very rich. They breed recklessly: the rich because
they can afford it, and the poor because they cannot afford the
precautions by which the artisans and the middle classes avoid
big families. Nevertheless the population declines, because the
high birth rate of the very poor is counterbalanced by a huge
infantile-mortality in the slums, whilst the very rich are also
the very few, and are becoming sterilized by the spreading revolt
of their women against excessive childbearing--sometimes against
any childbearing.
This last cause is important. It cannot be removed by any economic
readjustment. If every family were provided with 10,000 pounds a
year tomorrow, women would still refuse more and more to continue
bearing children until they are exhausted whilst numbers of others
are bearing no children at all. Even if every woman bearing and
rearing a valuable child received a handsome series of payments,
thereby making motherhood a real profession as it ought to be, the
number of women able or willing to give more of their lives to
gestation and nursing than three or four children would cost them
might not be very large if the advance in social organization and
conscience indicated by such payments involved also the opening up
of other means of livelihood to women.
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