IN DEFENCE OF THE SMALL FAMILY

Mt Benger Mail, 27 October 1937, Page 1

IN DEFENCE OF THE SMALL FAMILY

“I have a wife. If the world offered her nothing more than eighteen hours’ work a day looking after a brood of ten children, who. on my present income, would be half-starved, under-educated, and otherwise handicapped for life, I should deserve horse-whip-ping for spoiling eleven lives besides my own, not an award for populating the country. ‘‘ln human beings it is quality, not quantity, that counts. The ancient Greeks, with a handful v£ people, dominated the ancient world and laid the foundations of our own art, philosophy, ethics and science. The Elizabethan Englishman, who 'achieved intellectual and material greatness for a tiny island, did not number as many as Australians do to-day. “India, with its 338,000,000 people, is poverty-stricken and under-educated, because of its population. China, and all other Asiatic countries of huge population, struggle against the same handicap. A handful of white soldiers keep India in order; the Greek freemen defeated the Persian hordes; Russia’s millions cracked up under the strain of war.

“It is tiresome to hear people complaining about the selfishness of parents who have one or two children and devote the rest of their income to sport, pleasure or self-cultivation. Moralists have a complex that going without things is a virtue, that there is something noble and dignified about poverty, that a woman who slaves eighteen hours a day is somehow better than a woman who dresses well, has sufficient time to read and carry on intelligent conversation, and preserves her youth and beauty by physical exercise on the tennis court or golf course.

“Those who think in that manner usually have comfortable incomes, have never known what a degrading business it is to bear children once a year like a prize baconer, and, 100 to 1, belong to the male sex, which knows the pleasure of love without having to bear any of the pain.”

This is an extract from an arresting article in ‘The New Idea,’ the threepenny weekly for Australian and New Zealand women. Buy the issue for October 15 and read the complete case for the small family.