fruitful they are harmful. There are grounds for thinking that unrealisation of maternity favours sterility.

Generally speaking, birth control before the first child is inadvisable. On the other hand, the justifiable use of birth control is to limit the number of children, and to spread out their arrival in such a way as to serve their true interests and those of their home.

That such applications of birth control produce no harm receives support from the study of the numbers and distribution of the children of the professional classes.

The advantage and disadvantage of this or that contraceptive is a technical matter for the doctors to determine.

Again, it has been stated that artificial control is harmful because it leads to excessive indulgence. Experience and evidence are against this being a fact.

Contraceptives by the time and circumstance of their application involve prudence and control. The proper and efficient restraints on undue sexual indulgence are to be found in mutual consideration, sympathy, and tenderness and the pressing claims of life’s duties.

The sensualist who is not deterred from excess by these considerations will be completely careless whether his indulgence results in children or not—he is moved by his selfish impulses alone.

Careful Distinction.

Once more, careful distinction needs to be made between the use and the bad effects of the abuse of birth control. That its abuse produces harm I fully agree—harm to parents, to families, and to the nation. But abuse is not a just condemnation of legitimate use. Over-eating, over-drinking, over-smoking, over-sleeping, over-work do not carry condemnation of eating, drinking, smoking, sleeping, work.

But the evils of excessive birth control are very real. There is first the individual—every woman is better in body and mind for child bearing—the periodic completion of the maternal cycle brings out the best, preserves youth and maintains vital contact with life. Maternity gives to woman her most beautiful attributes. Fancy being mad enough to suppress it! If one watches the woman with one child and all maternity finished before thirty, and compare her at forty with the woman of the same age who has had, say, four children at proper intervals, who usually has the advantage in preservation of youth and beauty? Not the former.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that baby after baby every year or eighteen months wears and often exhausts a woman’s strength. The inference is that the use of birth control is good, its abuse bad.

Next, the children. Is it even necessary to refer to the failure of the single-child household? Poor little thing! Surrounded by over-anxious parents, spoilt, no children to play with, bored stiff by adults. And then, perhaps, illness, and it may be death—and when it is too late to produce another.

Of the many tragedies I met in the war none exceeded that attaching to the loss of only children. It often means the end of all things; nothing to live for—just blank despair.

The Way of Happiness.

The parents and the home both need children of varying ages. That is the way of happiness and enduring youth.

And lastly, the national aspect may be stated very briefly. If England is not to lose her place in the world her population must be maintained. Unless fathers and mothers produce an average of over three children that population will not be maintained.

If you say to a young husband and wife with their one or two children, “Do you like to contemplate that when you both leave life your country will, through your action, be worse off than when you entered life?” that is an appeal to patriotism, and likely to be a successful appeal.

There are signs of a public opinion forming which will condemn the