hatever conditions
performed, is beneficial to society. (The difference between the
primitive and modern view on this matter is aptly and quaintly
illustrated by two incidents. Seeing a certain Bantu woman who appeared
better cared for, less hard worked, and happier than the mass of
her companions, we made inquiry, and found that she had two impotent
brothers; because of this she herself had not married, but had borne by
different men fourteen children, all of whom when grown she had given
to her brothers. "They are fond of me because I have given them so many
children, therefore I have not to work like the other women; and my
brothers give me plenty of mealies and milk," she replied, complacently,
when questioned, "and our family will not die out." And this person,
whose conduct was so emphatically anti-social on all sides when viewed
from the modern standpoint, was evidently regarded as pre-eminently of
value to her family and to society because of her mere fecundity. On the
other hand, a few weeks back appeared an account in the London papers
of an individual who, taken up at the East End for some brutal offence,
blubbered out in court that she was the mother of twenty children.
"You should be ashamed of yourself!" responded the magistrate; "a woman
capable of such conduct would be capable of doing anything!" and the
fine was remorselessly inflicted. Undoubtedly, if somewhat brutally,
the magistrate yet gave true voice to the modern view on the subject of
excessive and reckless child-bearing.)

Further, owing partly to the diminished demand for child-bearing, rising
from the extreme difficulty and expense of rearing and education, and
to many other complex social causes, to which we shall return later,
millions of women in our modern societies are so placed as to be
absolutely compelled to go through life not merely childless, but
without sex relationship in any form whatever; while another mighty army
of women is reduced by the dislocations of our civilisation to accepting
sexual relationships which practically negate child-bearing, and whose
only product is physical and moral disease.

Thus, it has come to pass that vast numbers of us are, by modern social
conditions, prohibited from child-bearing at all; and that even those
among us who are child-bearers are required, in proportion as the class
of race to which we belong stands high in the scale of civilisation, to
produce in most cases a limited number of offspr