lating their families, children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and the Polish, Russian and German Jews, on the one hand, and to the thriftless and irresponsible-largely the casual laborers and the other denizens of the one-roomed tenements of our great cities-on the other. Twenty-five per cent. of our parents, as Professor Karl Pearson keeps warning us, is producing 50 per cent. of the next generation. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews. Finally, there are signs that even these races are becoming influenced. The ultimate future of these islands may be to the Chinese ! Thus, modern civilization is faced by two awkward facts; the production of children is rapidly declining, and this decline is not uniform, but characteristic of the more prudent, foreseeing and selfrestrained sections of the community. It is only in mitigation of the first of these facts that it can be urged that the death-rate is also declining, so that in most countries the net annual increase of population exhibits little sign of slackening. This, indeed, affords but slight ground of satisfaction. The probable diminution in the deathrate has very narrow limits; whilst that in the birth-rate is cumulative and limitless. What is of far greater social importance is that a diminished death-rate among those who are born in no way miti gates the evil influence of an adverse selection-it even intensifies its effects. The conclusion which the present writer draws from the investigation is, however, one of hope, not of despair. It is something to discover the cause of the phenomenon. Moreover, the cause is one that we can counteract. If the decline in the birth-rate had been due to physical degeneracy, whether brought about by "urbanization" or otherwise, we should not have known how to cope with it. But a deliberately volitional interference, due chiefly to economic motives, can at any moment be influenced, and its adverse selection stopped, partly by a mere alteration of the economic conditions, partly by the opportunity for the play of the other motives which will be thereby afforded. What seems indispensable and urgent is to alter the economic incidence of child-bearing. Under the present social conditions the birth of children in households maintained on less than three pounds a week (and these form four-fifths of the nation) is attended by almost penal consequences. The wife is incapacitated for some months from earning money. For a few weeks she is subject to a painful illness, with some risk. The husband has to provide a lump sum for the necessary medical attendance and domestic service. But this is not all. The parents know that for the next fourteen years they will have to dock themselves and their other children of luxuries and even of some of the necessaries of life, just because there will be another mouth to feed. To four-fifths of all the households in the land each succeeding baby means the probability of there being less food, less clothing, less house room, less recreation and less opportunity for advancement for every member of the family. Similar considerations appeal even more strongly to a majority of the remaining 20 per cent. of the population, who make up the "middle" and professional classes. Their higher standard of life, with its requirements in the way of culture and refinement, and with the long and expensive education which it demands for their .children, makes the advent even of a third or fourth child—to say nothing of the possibility of a family of eight or twelve-a burden far more psychologically depressing than that of the wage-earner. In order that the population may be recruited from the self-controlled and foreseeing members of each class rather than of those who are reckless and improvident, we must alter the balance of considerations in favor of the child-producing family. The question is whether we shall be able to turn round with sufficient sharpness and in time. For we have unconsciously based so much of our social policy-so many of our habits, traditions, prejudices and beliefs-on the assumption that the growth of population is always to be reckoned with, and even feared, that a genuine realization of the contrary position will involve great changes. There are thousands of men thinking themselves educated citizens to-day to whose whole system of social and economic beliefs the discovery will be as subversive as was that announced by Copernicus. We may at last understand what the modern economist means when he tells us that the most valuable of the year's crops, as it is the most costly, is not the wheat harvest or the lambing, but the year's quota of adolescent young men and women enlisted in the productive service of the community; and that the due production and best possible care of this particular product is of far greater consequence to the nation than any other of its occupations. Infant mortality, for instance--that terrible and quite needless slaughter within the first twelve months of one-seventh of all the babies that are bornis already appealing to us in a new way, though it is no greater than it was a generation ago. We shall suddenly remember, too, that one-third of all the paupers are young children; and we may then realize that it is, to the community, of far more consequence how it shall bring up this quarter of a million children over whom it has complete power than the exact degree of hardness with which it may choose to treat the adults. Instead of turning out the children to tramp with the father or beg with the mother, whenever these choose to take their discharge from the workhouse, which is the invariable practice to-day, we should rather jump at the chance of "adopting" these unfortunate beings in order to make worthy citizens of them. Half of the young paupers, moreover, are widows' children, bereft of the breadwinner. For them the community will have to arrange to continue in some form or another the maintenance which the father would have provided had he lived. Above all, in order to put a stop to the adverse selection that,is at present going on, we must encourage the thrifty, foreseeing, prudent and self-controlled parents to remove the check which, often unwillingly enough, they at present put on their natural instincts and love of children. We must make it easier for them to undertake family responsibilities. For instance, the arguments against the unlimited provision of medical attendance on the child-bearing mother and her children disappear. We may presently find the leader of the Opposition, if not the Prime Minister, advocating the municipal supply of milk to all infants, and a free meal on demand (as already provided by a far-seeing philanthropist at Paris) to mothers actually nursing their babies. We shall, indeed, have to face the problem of the systematic "endowment of motherhood," and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable economic basis. The feeding of all the children at school appears in a new light, and we come, at a stride, appreciably nearer to that not very far distant article in the education code making obligatory in the time-table a new subject-namely, " 12 to 1 p.m., table manners (materials provided)." One encouragement to parentage in the best members of the middle and upper artizan classes would be a great multiplication of maintenance scholarships for secondary, technical and university education, and the multiplication of tax-supported higher schools and colleges at nominal fees, or even free. Such a revolution in the economic incidence of the burden of child-bearing will, of course, be deprecated by the ignorant and unthinking, as calculated to encourage the idle and the thriftless, the drunken and the profligate to increase and multiply. The grave fact that we have to face is that, under our existing social arrangements, it is exactly these people, and practically these only, who at present make full use of their reproductive powers. Such a revolution in the economic incidence of the burden of child-bearing as is here proposed would, as a matter of fact, have exactly the opposite result. It would in no way increase the number of children born to those parents whose marriages are at present unregulated. But in the other section of every class of society, where the birth-rate is now regulated from motives of foresight and prudence, it would leave the way open. to the play of the best instincts of mankind. To the vast majority of women, and especially to those of fine type, the rearing of children. would be the most attractive occupation, if it offered economic advantages equal to those, say, of school teaching or service in the post office. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated, and in no way honored by the State. Once the production of healthy, moral and intelligent citizens is revered as a social service and made the subject of deliberate praise and encouragement on the part of the government, it will, we may be sure, attract the best, and most patriotic of the citizens. Once set free from the overwhelming economic penalties with which among four-fifths of the population it is at present visited, the rearing of a family may gradually be rendered part of the code of the ordinary citizen's morality. The natural repulsion to interference in marital relations will have free play. The mystic obligations of which the religious-minded feel the force will no longer be confronted by the dead wall of economic necessity. To the present writer it seems that only by some such "sharp turn" in our way of dealing with these problems can we avoid degeneration of type-that is, race deterioration, if not race suicide. 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