They would be tramping on roads where mendicity laws would prevail,
there would be no house-room for them, no squatting-places. The casual
wards would catch them and register them, and telephone one to the
other about them. It is rare that children come into this world without
a parent or so being traceable. Everything would converge to convince
these people that to bear children into such an unfavourable atmosphere
is an extremely inconvenient and undesirable thing. They would not have
many children, and such children as they had would fall easily into our
organized net and get the protection of the criticised and improved
development of the existing charitable institutions. [Footnote: "I
wonder whether there is any legal flaw in the second section of the
Prevention of Cruelty to Children Act of 1894, which may have been
_specially_ aimed at beggars with offspring. It is specially
punishable to beg having an infant in their arms, quite apart from
teaching the infant in question to beg. Or is this law insufficiently
enforced through popular apathy?"--C. G. STUART MENTEATH.] This is the
best we can do for those poor little creatures. As for that increasing
section of the Abyss that will contrive to live childless, these papers
have no quarrel with them. A childless wastrel is a terminating evil,
and it may be, a picturesque evil. I must confess that a lazy rogue is
very much to my taste, provided there is no tragedy of children to
smear the joke with misery. And if he or she neither taints nor tempts
the children, who are our care, a childless weakling we may freely let
our pity and mercy go out to. To go childless is in them a virtue for
which they merit our thanks.

These are the first necessities, then, in the Making of Men and the
bettering of the world, this courageous interference with what so many
people call "Nature's methods" and "Nature's laws," though, indeed,
they are no more than the methods and laws of the beasts. By such