they are dispensed with, or if the habit of taking them is never
begun. They are luxuries only to those who use them. To those who do not
they are nothing, and the lack of them is nothing. The sheer waste they
entail is gigantic, and the expenditure on them in such a country as
England would endow all its motherhood and provide good conditions for
all its children. The father who, in the future, is compelled to yield
the rights of mothers and children, may sometimes be compelled to
practise what at first looks like great self-restraint in these
respects. The point I wish to make is that the sacrifice and the need
for restraint are transient, and that thereafter there is simply more
liberty and the promise of longer life for the wise.

The working-out will be that the legislation of the future will benefit
the right kind of husband and father, but will restrain and irk the
wrong kind. But that is precisely what good legislation should do. Thus
the right kind of father, who in any case will do his best to care for
his wife and children, will be helped in the future by the State. It
will insist that he does the duty which in any case he means to do, but
it will make the doing easier. We see admirably working parallels to
this in the German insurance laws and their provision for death, disease
and old age. They benefit those whom they appear to harass. Insurance
against fatherhood will work in the same way. The State will not be
antagonistic to the father, but will be his best friend, knowing that
_its_ best friends are good fathers and mothers. There will be far less
worry and anxiety for well-meaning parents, especially for mothers, but
also for fathers. Nor do I, for one, much mind how substantial may be
the State's contribution to the father's efforts, provided only that
those efforts are demanded and obtained.

Nothing is more certain than that we are about to free ourselves from
the crass blindness of the nineteenth century in its great delusion that
the wealth of a nation consists in the number of things it makes and
possesses. Parenthood and childhood will shortly come to be recognized
as the first concern of the State that is to continue, and whilst the
birth-rate continues to fall, the honour paid to fathers and mothers
will continue to rise. We shall become as wise in time as the Jews have
been ever since we have record of them. We shall estimate the relative
value of these things as well as if we were the kinds