deprecated. It encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the
world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity
of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree,
a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to
eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race
and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant.

On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened
public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy,
maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our
boasted civilization. So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions
of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and
barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many
high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful
facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so
necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem. Their
"hearts" are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate
action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first
superficial program that is advanced. Immediate action may sometimes be
worse than no action at all. The "warm heart" needs the balance of
the cool head. Much harm has been done in the world by those
too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that "something be done
at once."

They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to
subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking.
As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often
forgotten passage:

"The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole