"WAR BABIES."

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 150, 26 June 1915, Page 16

"WAR BABIES."

Concerning the "war babies," and various statistical estimates as to their number, Mr. Harold Begbie points out that thera has been exaggeration on either side. People who pretend to know don't know. •1?^ is , utteri y impossible to know within a hundred or two hundred thousand how many children will be born this year to unmarried mothers. If those who give alarming figures "are manifestly without any grounds for their assertion, so, too, those who dismiss the whole thing as sensationalism have nothing more substantial than air under their easy scorn. The unmarried mother does not put on her hat and enquire of tho first policeman in the street the nearest way to the office of a statisti-, cian. Nobody knows, nobody can possibly know, how many poor girls at this present moment are agonising in tho silence of their own souls over a secret they dare not confide even to their own mothers. And nobody knows, either, how many mothers to whom this terrible secret has at last been told, after a frightful struggle, are now seeking by every means in their power to keep the secret from their friends and neighbours." The unmarried mother must be helped, not glorified. All life is a struggle to be better, and the incentive of the struggle must not be removed. -