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LABOUR TROUBLES AND BIRTH
CONTROL

"Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle class. But they have not yet begun to effect those great changes in human destiny which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish. Only when, in addition to just institutions, the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious foresight, can the conquests made from the powers of nature by the intellect and energy of scientific discoverers become the common property of the species, and the means of improving and elevating the universal lot." - JOHN STUART MILL.

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Morally, as well as eugenically, it was right for people in certain circumstances to use harmless means to control the birth-rate.

“It was immoral to avoid having children from selfish motives, but it was surely also immoral to have child after child under circumstances which, humanly speaking, were such as to render the proper upbringing of such children impossible.”—THE BISHOP OF BIRMINGHAM, Chairman of the National Birth-rate Commission (The Times report of the proceedings of the Commission, April 8th, 1919).

THE FUTURE OF THE ENGLISH RACE

"Our starting-point must be that the pressure of population upon the means of subsistence is a constant fact in the human race, as in every other species of animals and plants. There is no species in which the numbers are not kept down far below the natural capacity for increase, by the limitation of available food.

"Occasionally, from accidental circumstances, England was for a short time under-populated, and these were the periods when, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, Archdeacon Cunningham, and other authorities, the labourer was well off. The most striking example was in the half-century after the Black Death, which carried off nearly half of the population. Wages increased threefold, and the Government tried in vain to protect employers by enforcing pre-plague rates. Not only were wages high, but food was so abundant that farmers often gave their men a square meal which was not in the contract." -THE DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S (Edinburgh Review, April, 1919).

MARTYRS TO MATERNITY

"No; my remedy is Birth Control. A knowledge of this ought to be made available for all who desire it, and I know from my own experience that many C3 parents earnestly do desire it. In Holland, they have regular birth control clinics, recognized by the State, where mothers can get practical instruction from sympathetic women doctors.

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