unnecessary for each district to sustain the renewal and increase of
its own population. Certain wide regions will become specifically
administrative and central--the home lands, the mother lands, the
centres of education and population, and others will become
specifically fields of action. Something of this kind is to a slight
degree already the case with Scotland, which sends out its hardy and
capable sons wherever the world has need of them; the Swiss mountains,
too, send their sons far and wide in the world; and on the other hand,
with regard to certain elements of population, at any rate, London and
the Gold Coast and, I suspect, some regions in the United States of
America, receive to consume.]

But it will be urged that these things are likely to bear rather
severely on the very poor parent. To which a growing number of people
will reply that the parent should not be a parent under circumstances
that do not offer a fair prospect of sound child-birth and nurture. It
is no good trying to eat our cake and have it; if the parent does not
suffer the child will, and of the two, we, of the New Republic, have no
doubt that the child is the more important thing.

It may be objected, however, that existing economic conditions make
life very uncertain for many very sound and wholesome kinds of people,
and that it is oppressive and likely to rob the State of good citizens
to render parentage burthensome, and to surround it with penalties. But
that directs our attention to a second scheme of expedients which have
crystallized about the expression, the Minimum Wage. The cardinal idea
of this group of expedients is this, that it is unjust and cruel in the
present and detrimental to the future of the world to let any one be
fully employed at a rate of payment at which a wholesome, healthy, and,
by the standards of comfort at the time, a reasonable happy life is