d those few, well born and well instructed,
is the modern demand. And the woman who today merely produces twelve
children and suckles them, and then turns them loose on her society and
family, is regarded, and rightly so, as a curse and down draught, and
not the productive labourer, of her community. Indeed, so difficult and
expensive has become in the modern world the rearing and training of
even one individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with the
complexities and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family as
well as to the state, unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has
already, in most cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in the
case of the artisan, who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice must
support and train his children till their twelfth or fourteenth year,
if they are ever to become even skilled manual labourers, and who if his
family be large often sinks beneath the burden, allowing his offspring,
untaught and untrained, to become waste products of human life; or, in
that of the professional man, who by his mental toil is compelled to
support and educate, at immense expense, his sons till they are twenty
or older, and to sustain his daughters, often throughout their whole
lives should they not marry, and to whom a large family proves often no
less disastrous; while the state whose women produce recklessly large
masses of individuals in excess of those for whom they can provide
instruction and nourishment is a state, in so far, tending toward
deterioration. The commandment to the modern woman is now not simply
"Thou shalt bear," but rather, "Thou shalt not bear in excess of thy
power to rear and train satisfactorily;" and the woman who should
today appear at the door of a workhouse or the tribunal of the
poor-law guardians followed by her twelve infants, demanding honourable
sustenance for them and herself in return for the labour she had
undergone in producing them, would meet with but short shrift. And the
modern man who on his wedding-day should be greeted with the ancient
good wish, that he might become the father of twenty sons and twenty
daughters, would regard it as a malediction rather than a blessing. It
is certain that the time is now rapidly approaching when child-bearing
will be regarded rather as a lofty privilege, permissible only to
those who have shown their power rightly to train and provide for their
offspring, than a labour which in itself, and under w