PUBLIC OPINION.

Hokitika Guardian, 22 November 1927, Page 1

PUBLIC OPINION.

THE FALLING BIRTH-RATE. In tlie past six years our birth-rate has dropped by over 27 per cent. It is now the lowest in Europe, with the single exception of Sweden. Even in France, where the testamentary division of property and the custom of dowry make for small families, more babies are born in proportion to the population than in Britain. Every fresh report issued hy the RegistrarGeneral emphasises the fact that a

falling birth-rate is not a passing phenomenon, but a permanent feature of our social life. Is is that parents think more of themselves and are more bent on enjoyment than they used to he? Or is it that they realise more keenly the responsibilities of parent hood and shrink from having children whoso future is so insecure? Taxation and the economic stringency play a part in the problem, and so does the new care of women for their health and their revolt against the idea that motherhood is the whole of life. It is not a matter that lends itself to easy dogmatisms, even though the statistics seem to show that it is those as a rule in the best circumstances who have the fewest children.—“ The Sunday Times.”

EGO NO Ar IC HUAI A N LSA r. Much that Buskin wrote on economics, as upon art, will not live, if indeed it has not already perished. He passed the torch on to men like Al orris, however, men who, half-mad with beauty like Guinevere, sought to make the production ol common things—furniture, wall-paper, enamels, dyes, printing, etc.—things of worth, ministering to a great communal aesthetic. The impress of Aforris in actual production of homo furniture and in revolutionising Victorian taste was considerable, alt hough economically he had very little influence. He has bequeathed a spirit and a tradition, however. to the whole Socialist movement, the best thinkers of which have been forced hack since his time on basic considerations, aesthetic and moral, rather than economic. To determine the true ends production should serve is the problem of the future. Involved in it are problems of the place of machinery in large-scale reproduction, self-government in industry, functionalism, and the distribution of the Eocroward. These problems have so far been tackled by few men, and even then, often with woefully inadequate mental equipment or industrial experience. Tt is to the solution of these problems the scientific economist must bend liis energies, becoming less an exponent or analyst of current economic. and financial practice than a prophet of tilings to come, a masterbuilders of the new economic humanism.—G. AY. Thomson in “ The Nineteenth Century and After.” TO THE TRADE UNION CONGRESS. “Greater work may he done hy your unions than ever before if you remember that the way to success lies not so much by violent agitation as it does hy winning general respect,” said the Rev. P. T. R. Kirk, general director of the Industrial Christian Fellowship, in a Trades Union Congress discourse reported in the “ Guardian.” “ If the workers of England introduce to the' world a democracy which is Christian, not only in its antagonism to greed and in its vision of a better social age. hut also in the methods it employs to rid our common life of the one and to establish the other—then there is nothing of advancement and good that is out ol their reach. Wc must treat al! men, even minorities, as free persons ; must not thwart the well-being of those not concerned in our disputes ; and must allow nothing to hand us into classes that will make us regard men in other classes with thinly veiled hate. Whatever we gain, we shall not win through to the day when all are free, happy, and in fellowship, hy such means.”