has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't

understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children

or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the

supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other

affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most

fundamental aspect of existence…

It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of

the position of women in general, or the change in my ideas about

all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was

bringing about, that led me to the heretical views I have in the

last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid

discussion into the field of practical politics. Those influences,

no doubt, have converged to the same end, and given me a powerful

emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of

things that first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment

of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Imperialism. Now

that Iam exiled from the political world, it is possible to

estimate just how effectually that grafting has been done.

I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a

universal education grew to paramount importance in my political

scheme. It is but a short step from this to the question of the

quantity and quality of births in the community, and from that again

to these forbidden and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and

the family organisation. A sporadic discussion of these aspects had

been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, and articles on

the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit

were staples of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermittent

scolding of prosperous childless people in general-one never

addressed them in particular-nothing was done towards arresting

those adverse processes. Almost against my natural inclination, I

found myself forced to go into these things. I came to the

conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family,

based on the existing marriage contract, was failing in its work.

It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and

well trained enough for the demands of the developing civilised

state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and decaying in its

intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some

very extensive and courageous reorganisation was needed. The old

haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly

discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or

good enough for the growing needs and possibilities of our Empire.

Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a

puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle.

No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present

question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded, unadvocated, and

sits at every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional

except the improvement of the race, and it became more and more

doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and

beautiful and courageous people must come together and have

children, women with their fine senses and glorious devotion must be

freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to

be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom

need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of circumstances

have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to

whisper it for fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the

family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of pigmies

in a not too capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant-

and decided to go on living happily by cutting him dead…

The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it

can get the best possible increase under the best possible

conditions. I became more and more convinced that the independent

family unit of to-day, in which the man is master of the wife and

owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him,

subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up

or down, does not supply anything like the best conceivable

conditions. We want to modernise the family footing altogether. An

enormous premium both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put

upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held out

to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to

social and material considerations.

The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition

of the family is this: that beneath the pretence that nothing is

changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy

everything is changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls