JOHN BURNS ON THE DECLINING BIRTHRATE.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1756, 1 November 1905, Page 67

JOHN BURNS ON THE DECLINING BIRTHRATE.

There is a shameless spirit of pessimism about everything abroad just now. The Jeremiahs have been on the rampage; the dismal and the doleful wouldbe experts have all been regarding other people as melancholy and things as decadent as themselves. With them everything is wrong, from latitude and longitude to the London County Council. Not content with their universal wailing at “the decay of home litre, of mere man, and all-conquering woman, they have started a crusade against the babies, actual, potential and to come. Now, babies are what their mothers make them. A man’s reformation must begin with bis grandmother. lam afraid, however, that the transmitted defects of our grandparents, past- hard drinking, degrading toil, alternated by slothful unemployment, deficient nourishment, accompanied, by their moral, mental and physical consequences, have temporarily weakened some sections of our present race and sterilised or impoverished the fecundity and vitality of some of our women. BRITISH STOCK STILL SOUND. But these individual defects are not irremediate in the race. The sap is gocd, though branches wither and leaves decay. The exceptional symptoms are not ingrained, permanent or chronic. Like their cause they are transient, and will yield to the good treatment of sobriety, good food, reasonable work, cleanliness, good housing, fresh air, and the healthy body with the sound mind. Given these —and this is the duty of every reformer to secure' —I believe the future of the British race is ahead, not behind, and is not- dependent, on either high or low birthrates, but other causes. The current standards of judgment of men —territory, and birth-rates—are wrong. Megalomania is a disease. Now size is everything; numbers the supreme -test. This is nonsense. Bigness is not greatness; numbers are not quality (vide our present Cabinet); mere avoirdupois net -strength—-lock at Russia'. If so, the Japanese, the Goorkhas, and other small but virile people are doomed, and in the megalomaniac’s balance are tried and found wanting. With some people eveiy thing is wrong. I never wish to see-? better soldiers than the Brigade of Guards, with whom I trudged 200 miles two years ago. I never wish to see better navvies than I saw at Barking the other day. JNor can there be seen finer girls, women and men than now, where the domestic means are adequate to then* substance and enjoyment. Yet I never saw two worse specimens of attenuated manhood, given their size, than two of the self-same soldiers, who, having left the colours, hr.d joined the legion of the lost in their fruitless search for work. In their case the social and economic conditions were to blame; adjust them, these two men would recover their social stride and become as good as ever. QUALITY, NOT QUANTITY. So it is in the eyes of the jaundiced critic with the marriage-rate, the birthrate, the physique; and the intelligence of the nation. They cite the defensive special case, and give it general application. > ■ ’Tis the day of the chattel, web to weave, corn to grind; Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind. And the fact that you have been discussing in “The Daily Chronicle’’ the consequences of economic conditions and social circumstances which affect births, marriages, and deaths, is a healthy and not a bad sign, and proof that mankind should dominate things, and by so doing help the race from the cradle onwards.

'Personalty, I am not, under all circumstances, for a desolating flood of babies. The number of a family is to me less than their quality. What is more, some regard should 'be paid to the mother, who too often pays need r lessly for the price of excessive maternity, either by her enfeeblement, or, alas! often by her death. On the other hand, every healthy marriageable woman ought to marry. Better a baby in her arms than a dog in her lap, bottles in her boudoir, and vain regrets in her lonely childless after life. Every married woman ought to have some children: but I disagree entirely that she ought to rear indiscriminately, and without regard to fitness, means, home, and environment, all the children that, apart from choice, disposition, and sustainable capacity, she ds capable of being materially responsible for. I knew an instance of a man whose wife bore to him nine children in ten years. The mother died with the arrival of, the ninth. He was a brute; she was his victim. The fact is socially deplorable, and personally preventable. On the other hand, there are too many women, and it is the same, or worse in other countries, to whom sacred, enviable, necessary maternity is a burden, a social handicap, a domestic inconvenience. Poor, silly, foolish creatures! As the years go inevitably they will find, to their loss, cost, illhealth, unhappiness and shame, that they who never gathered, never garnered, never will enjoy.

There is no human joy on earth equal to the maternal instinct, duly satisfied, properly enjoyed. I never realise how much man has lost in perfect happiness than when I see, enjoy, and frankly envy the all-absorbing ecstasy of a happy mother fondling a healthy child. And this joy to- -the individual, this duty to the race, this profitable investment for a healthy, middle, and happy feminine old-age, is thrown away for the transient caprice of fashion, the dead-sea fruit of society, and to preserve for -a few fleeting months the mould of human form, the artificial symmetry of waist, and be the cynosure of silly eyes.