within certain narrow limits these things no doubt serve a useful
purpose in individual cases. But nowadays there is an increasing
indisposition to meet the general problem by such methods, because
nowadays people are alive to certain ulterior consequences that were at
first overlooked. Any extensive relief of parental responsibility we
now know pretty certainly will serve to encourage and stimulate births
in just those strata of society where it would seem to be highly
reasonable to believe they are least desirable. It is just where the
chances for a child are least that passions are grossest, basest, and
most heedless, and stand in the greatest need of a sense of the gravity
of possible consequences to control their play, and to render it
socially innocuous. If we were to take over or assist all the children
born below a certain level of comfort, or, rather, if we were to take
over their mothers before the birth occurred, and bring up that great
mass of children under the best conditions for them--supposing this to
be possible--it would only leave our successors in the next generation
a heavier task of the same sort. The assisted population would grow
generation by generation relatively to the assisting until the Sinbad
of Charity broke down. And quite early in the history of Charities it
was found that a very grave impediment to their beneficial action lay
in one of the most commendable qualities to be found in poor and
poorish people, and that is pride. While Charities, perhaps, catch the
quite hopeless cases, they leave untouched the far more extensive mass
of births in non-pauper, not very prosperous homes--the lower middle-
class homes in towns, for example, which supply a large proportion of
poorly developed adults to our community. Mr. Seebohm Rowntree, in his
"Poverty" (that noble, able, valuable book), has shown that nearly
thirty per cent. at least of a typical English town population goes
short of the physical necessities of life. These people are fiercely
defensive in such matters as this, and one may no more usurp and share