_Illegitimate births_ in 1846-1850 numbered 2.2 per 1000, in 1896-
1900 they numbered 1.2 per 1000. So that if it were not for this fall
in illegitimate births the period 1896-1900 would show a positive rise
in the effective rate of increase of .8 per thousand. The eminent
persons therefore who ascribe our falling birth-rate to irreligion and
so forth, either speak without knowledge or with some sort of knowledge
beyond my ken. England is, as a matter of fact, becoming not only more
hygienic and rational, but more moral and more temperate. The highly
moral, healthy, prolific, pious England of the past is just another
poetical delusion of the healthy savage type.]

These poor little souls are born, amidst tears and suffering they gain
such love as they may, they learn to feel and suffer, they struggle and
cry for food, for air, for the right to develop; and our civilisation
at present has neither the courage to kill them outright quickly,
cleanly, and painlessly, nor the heart and courage and ability to give
them what they need. They are overlooked and misused, they go short of
food and air, they fight their pitiful little battle for life against
the cruellest odds; and they are beaten. Battered, emaciated, pitiful,
they are thrust out of life, borne out of our regardless world, stiff
little life-soiled sacrifices to the spirit of disorder against which
it is man's preeminent duty to battle. There has been all the pain in
their lives, there has been the radiated pain of their misery, there
has been the waste of their grudged and insufficient food, and all the
pain and labour of their mothers, and all the world is the sadder for
them because they have lived in vain.


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