ESTABLISHED 1875 The Manawatu Daily Times. The Oldest Manawatu Journal Published Every Morning. WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 4, 1903. DECLINING BIRTH RATE.

Manawatu Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 7640, 4 February 1903, Page 2

ESTABLISHED 1875

The Manawatu Daily Times. The Oldest Manawatu Journal Published Every Morning. WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 4, 1903. DECLINING BIRTH RATE.

Evbiiv year the Registrar-General reports that the New Zealand birth rate is declining, and every year, two hundred frenzied and dishevelled editors in the Colony seize their pens and pronounce the most fearful anathemas against some persons unknown for their persistent and wayward sterility. The unvarying quality of the statistics levelled at the heads of male and female shoulder-shruggeis who look at the familiar head-lines, and then pass on to something more congenial, suggests the idea that they are kept in the editorial diaries ready to be ivg^oil out annually whenever the Registrar.Geheffi-! shall .give the precise signal. It is a painful sight to witness these editors—not all of them robust men, or men of noble and inspiring p^ysique—eniploy&fl in the Sisyphus-

like occupation of rolling these great piles of statistics up the steep mountain side of Fact, in the sure and certain knowledge of their own impotence to prevent them from rolling down again into precisely the same position they were when their devoted task commenced. They mean Avell, poor fellows, as ancient Sisyphus did, but they cannot by tons of cold, printed statistics, influence the poor to yearn for increase ; the woman to welcome the pangs of maternity ; the maid to relinquish untrammelled maidenhood forthe yoke of matrimony. As a matter of fact, if it were not for the consummate egotism which lures the man portion of humanity to pose as the supremo authority on all questions, it would occur to some of these frantic scolding mortals that it was their turn to stand down and give the women-folk an opportunity of making the position a little clear. We venture, with all diffidence, to assert—being a mere man ourselves —that the majority of editorial male persons who assume to preach authoritatively on this question, have not bothered to interrogate their women-folk with a view to discovering what the educational effect of such interrogation would be upon themselves. That is surely the explanation of the profound ignorance which obscures their propositions, and the monstrous fatuities which enshroud their conclusions in reference to this most intricate problem. Our theory on the subject needs no statistical elaboration. It is this. For centuries woman has been the bond slave of man. She has been the slave of his amours ; tho victim of his caprices; more or less the indifferent participant in his sexual solicitudes. Her chief function has been motherhood, or to be more truthful and concise, reproduction. Evolution, however, is freeing, has freed, woman. Through education it was revealed to man that he was trying to keep in subjection a stronger and a purer force. The results. astounded him, shook his marvellous faith in his own altitude. So he began weakly to make concessions to his wife, his daughter, or to somebody else's sister ; to send them to college; to elect them to responsible positions; to give them diplomas ; and to concede them—as a mere concession mind you ! —the franchise. And woman being bond-slave no longer, and having the breath of freedom in her nostrils, yearns for further concessions, further privileges, more freedom. The maternal instinct has by no means died down in her;' bat instinctive re-aciion against becoming again a crude, joyless, maternal machine is dominant and renders her impervious to all external influences. Woman having been allowed to taste emancipation and some of the. sweets of life, is incurious iv regard to the statistical aspect of the cmestion. She looks shudderingly down the dark vista of the past with its myriad tortured and unhappy mothers, not living, but existing, with but one aim—maternity ; one object —the care of children; one goal—the peaceful grave. And she hears in fancy's thought the cry rising weird and drear through the centuries "How long, O Lord, how long?" Then, though perhaps unwittingly, she registers the internal vow to be delivered, to be free, and uses the many methods available to her of obviating maternity, which spells in her vocabulary a tie, or, in the extreme, servitude. It must be said too that woman does not get much encouragement from later-day man to realise the dangers which attach to this line of reasoning. Man is now as he has been all down the centuries, careless and casual in his domestic relations, ease-loving, pleasure-loving, and selfloving most of all. He has a set objection to large families, as making him work harder, unsettling what he is pleased to look upon as his nerves, and reducing his avenifes of legitimate and illegitimate enjoyment. If the press and the clergy can reform the man and make him domestic, decent, and homeloving, things will return to a happy mean, and a desirable equilibrium; and —the birth rate will be all right.