A great many remedies have been proposed, but almost all of them are
not only futile but pernicious. A system of bounties to parents for
each child would be no inducement to the classes which have already
surrendered to this degeneration. Such a policy would only encourage
the further multiplying of the poor and the unfit. And the remedy is
not to be found in the multiplication of agencies for the preservation
of child life. The conservation of the child in the slum will not
compensate for the destruction of the child in the mansion-house. A
policy which aims at the survival of the unfit cannot enrich the race.
Such methods are to be commended, but they are mere palliatives. When
the bone needs to be scraped, it is futile to go on applying poultices.

The true remedy is in the realisation of God and in the return of the
nation to Him. It is when the soul is awakened {189} to God that men
realise the heinousness of sacrificing life to selfishness. For God is
the fountain of life; and it is not merely the physical life that is
atrophied by racial limitation. The blow is in reality aimed not at
the race but at God.

For from God all life proceeds, and the whole universe is the process
of His self-realisation. The glory of earth and sea and sky are the
glory of the outgoing of the divine energy. But the highest of all the
processes of the divine self-realisation is in man. In the world there
is nothing great but man; and the world is enriched for God by His
children. There is no limit to His creative energy, no failure in His
imagination, for each new life is different, and each fresh and new.
In His children God realises Himself as love and tenderness. They are
the only things that can love and laugh and cling. The music of their
joyous merriment is God's best anthems. Each new human life is a
temple of the Holy {190} Ghost. Through them the divine life grows
more and more. And to each is committed some separate element of the
divine treasure, for each is as different from others as if it alone
were created. When men, then, set themselves to suppress human life,
they are setting themselves to suppress God. It is the great tide of
the creative life that they set themselves to dam. The joyousness of
the creative genius that ever creates but never repeats itself, they
bring to nought. They deny to God on earth the temples for His
indwelling. Only when the soul realises God thus brooding over the
face o