l spontaneous
desire. The tragedy of it all is that even to attain the end in
view--moderation in the size of families--such methods are to a large
extent unnecessary. Not to every young married couple does a child
arrive at the end of a year. Some, using no artificial checks, wait
two or three years before the first baby comes. Even if it does come,
however, at the end of a year, there are many advantages to
counterbalance the small means and perhaps hard living of the young
pair. For when people are young they can put up with small means,
because they are strong enough to work hard and help each other;
indeed, the demand for little work and many luxuries in youth is not a
healthy one, it is a sign of decadence in the race.

Moreover, even though an early family involve real hardship for
awhile, it has the great advantage that parents and children later on
are still young together, and that means far more to the child in
understanding friendship and helpfulness during the most critical
period of life than extra comforts or pleasures would have meant to
the parents, and if young parents realised this, would they not put
the child first?

The so-called advantages of a few years between one child and the next
so that the parents may give fuller care and attention to each, are
far outweighed from the child's point of view by the advantages of
playmates in the nursery of nearly its own age, who are a source of
education in the give and take of life such as no adult can supply. If
parents wish to have only three or four children, it is to the
advantage of the mother as well as of the children, to have the little
family early in life--they are then all in the nursery together, and
later all at school, and her life work is in this way so arranged
that she may give most service to the world in addition to carrying on
the race.

Our conclusion is that for mothers and children it is very desirable
that no contraceptives should be used in the early years of married
life.

In the vast majority of families where no restrictions or unnatural
means are used and where mothers nurse their children for eight or
nine months, children only come every two years. Even if a young
couple decide that they cannot afford to bring up more than four
children, they have first to prove that four children will be given
them--in many cases they will not have so many, and as years go by the
fertility of the mother becomes progressively less, so th