expedients we may hope to see, first, a certain fall in the birth-rate,
a fall chiefly in the birth-rate of improvident, vicious, and feeble
types, a continuation, in fact, of that fall that is already so
conspicuous in illegitimate births in Great Britain; secondly, a
certain, almost certainly more considerable fall in the death-rate of
infants and young children, and that fall in the infantile death-rate
will serve to indicate, thirdly, a fall no statistics will fully
demonstrate in what I may call the partial death-rate, the dwarfing and
limiting of that innumerable host of children who do, in an underfed,
meagre sort of a way, survive. This raising of the standard of homes
will do a work that will not end with the children; the death-line will
sag downward for all the first twenty or thirty years of life. Dull-
minded, indolent, prosperous people will say that all this is no more
than a proposal to make man better by machinery, that you cannot reform
the world by Board of Trade Regulations and all the rest of it. They
will say that such work as this is a scheme of grim materialism, and
that the Soul of Man gains no benefit by this "so-called Progress,"
that it is not birth-rates that want raising but Ideals. We shall deal
later with Ideals in general. Here I will mention only one, and that
is, unhappily, only an Ideal Argument. I wish I could get together all
these people who are so scornful of materialistic things, out of the
excessively comfortable houses they inhabit, and I wish I could
concentrate them in a good typical East London slum--five or six
together in each room, one lodging with another, and I wish I could
leave them there to demonstrate the superiority of high ideals to
purely material considerations for the rest of their earthly career
while we others went on with our sordid work unencumbered by their
ideality.

Think what these dry-looking projects of building and trade regulation,