MAN, AND HIS FATHER THE CHILD

Evening Post, Volume XCIX, Issue 135, 8 June 1920, Page 8

MAN, AND HIS FATHER THE CHILD

Children, says General Birdwood, form tho best crop that any country can raise. That is true, but children-raising, like other crops and other industries, requires reasonably-priced labour and material. Compare it, for instance, with chickenraising. Everyone knows that dear food (grain, meal, etc.) put many poultry farmers out,of business; and (though it is not much talked about) does anyone doubt that the same high prices of food and material (boots, clothes, etc.) have put out of the child-raising business not a few well-intentioned but not over-finan-cial parents? And if the family industry is hit by the prices of food and material, is it not also hit by the scarcity of labour? Though there never was—in Britain at all events—such <an excess of females as now exists, it is increasingly difficult to obtain female labour to assist mothers. Perhaps helpful ideas like daynurseries, kindergartens, and labour-sav-ing devices at home will eventually do a good deal to compensate the principal worker in the enterprise of raising children. But meanwhile " the best crop that any country can raise" is not popular, and the State- subsidies in its interest fail in their purpose even more distinctly than do the guaranteed prices of wheat.

The second lesson imparted by General Birdwood—the need of replenishing population by immigration as well as by birth —interlocks with the first, because one of the main purposes of immigration is to increase the amount of domestic help available to those mothers who still continue to regard mothering as a privilege and as a duty. Relief of this sort is obtainable by immigration or not at all. Then, again, immigration of the right type should supply to industry, particularly to pastoral industry, the labour that is necessary to the production that is in turn necessary to a reduced cost of living. The gospel of production is a gospel of woi'k, and a gospel of work needs v/orkers. Not less important is the fact that never again, either in peace or in war, will an empty or half-empty country be free to pursue its own development. Either it will be conquered by the "peaceful penetration" of more prolific and industrial peoples, or else, for lack of defenders, it will Be militarily invaded and reduced to a sink of moral degradation like some districts of France and Belgium. With grim meaning, General Birdwood speaks of " the absolute need for keeping any future war in somebody else's backyard." That need spells men, strong men, and plenty of them; without •whom the fate of the women and children, even in " civilised " times, may be too awful for words.