king a home is equally shared by husband and wife, the
world will enter upon an era of happiness undreamed of now. As it is
now, the whole matter of marrying and homemaking is left to chance.
Every department of life, every profession in which men and women
engage, has certain qualifications which must be complied with, except
the profession of homemaking. A young man and a young woman say: "I
believe we'll get married" and forthwith they do. The state sanctions
it, and the church blesses it. They may be consumptive, epileptic,
shiftless, immoral, or with a tendency to insanity. No matter. They
may go on and reproduce their kind. They are perfectly free to bring
children into the world, who are a burden and a menace to society.
Society has to bear it--that is all! "Be fruitful and multiply!"
declares the church, as it deplores the evils of race suicide. Many
male moralists have cried out for large families. "Let us have better
and healthier babies if we can," cried out one of England's bishops,
not long ago, "but let us have more babies!"

Heroic and noble sentiment and so perfectly safe! It reminds one of
the dentist's advertisement: "Teeth extracted without pain"--and his
subsequent explanation: "It does not hurt me a bit!"

Martin Luther is said to have stood by the death-bed of a woman, who
had given birth to sixteen children in seventeen years, and piously
exclaimed: "She could not have died better!"

"By all means let us have more babies," says the Bishop. Even if they
are anemic and rickety, ill-nourished and deformed, and even if the
mothers, already overburdened and underfed, die in giving them birth?
To the average thinking woman, this wail for large families, coming as
it always does from men, is rather nauseating.

When the cry has been so persistently raised for more children, the
women naturally wonder why more care is not exerted for the protection
of the children who are already here. The reason is often given for
not allowing women to have the free grants of land in Canada on the
same conditions as men, that it would make them too independent of
marriage, and, as one commissioner of emigration phrased it: "It is not
independent women we want; it is population."

Granting that population is very desirable, would it not be well to
save what we have? Six or seven thousand of our population in Canada
drop out of the race every year as a direct result of the liquor
traffic, and a higher pe