The Endowment of Motherhood - Page 2

things to minimise that
discouragement.

Consider the case of an energetic young man and an energetic young woman
in our modern world. So long as they remain "unencumbered" they can
subsist on a comparatively small income and find freedom and leisure to
watch for and follow opportunities of self-advancement; they can travel,
get knowledge and experience, make experiments, succeed. One might
almost say the conditions of success and self-development in the modern
world are to defer marriage as long as possible, and after that to defer
parentage as long as possible. And even when there is a family there is
the strongest temptation to limit it to three or four children at the
outside. Parents who can give three children any opportunity in life
prefer to do that than turn out, let us say, eight ill-trained children
at a disadvantage, to become the servants and unsuccessful competitors
of the offspring of the restrained. That fact bites us all; it does not
require a search. It is all very well to rant about "race-suicide," but
there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for
all but the really rich, and so patent are they that I doubt if all the
eloquence of Mr. Roosevelt and its myriad echoes has added a thousand
babies to the eugenic wealth of the English-speaking world.

Modern married people, and particularly those in just that capable
middle class from which children are most urgently desirable from the
statesman's point of view, are going to have one or two children to
please themselves but they are not going to have larger families under
existing conditions, though all the ex-Presidents and all the pulpits in
the world clamour together for them to do so.

If having and rearing children is a private affair, then no one has any
right to revile small families; if it is a public service, then the
parent is justified in looking to the State to recognise that service
and offer some compensation for the worldly disadvantages it entails. He
is justified in saying that while his unencumbered rival wins past him
he is doing the State the most precious service in the world by rearing
and educating a family, and that the State has become his debtor.

In other words, the modern State has got to pay for its children if it
really wants them--and more particularly it has to pay for the children
of good homes.

The alternative to that is racial replacement and social decay. That is
the essential idea conveyed by this phrase, the Endowment of Motherhood.

Now, how is the paying to be done? That needs a more elaborate answer,
of which I will give here only the roughest, crudest suggestion.

Probably it would be found best that the payment should be made to the