This last cause is important. It cannot be removed by any economic
readjustment. If every family were provided with 10,000 pounds a
year tomorrow, women would still refuse more and more to continue
bearing children until they are exhausted whilst numbers of others
are bearing no children at all. Even if every woman bearing and
rearing a valuable child received a handsome series of payments,
thereby making motherhood a real profession as it ought to be, the
number of women able or willing to give more of their lives to
gestation and nursing than three or four children would cost them
might not be very large if the advance in social organization and
conscience indicated by such payments involved also the opening up
of other means of livelihood to women. And it must be remembered
that urban civilization itself, insofar as it is a method of
evolution (and when it is not this, it is simply a nuisance), is a
sterilizing process as far as numbers go. It is harder to keep up
the supply of elephants than of sparrows and rabbits; and for the
same reason it will be harder to keep up the supply of highly
cultivated men and women than it now is of agricultural laborers.
Bees get out of this difficulty by a special system of feeding
which enables a queen bee to produce 4,000 eggs a day whilst the
other females lose their sex altogether and become workers
supporting the males in luxury and idleness until the queen has
found her mate, when the queen kills him and the quondam females
kill all the rest (such at least are the accounts given by
romantic naturalists of the matter).


THE RIGHT TO MOTHERHOOD