“RACE SUICIDE”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21976, 10 June 1933, Page 8

“RACE SUICIDE”

The Bishop of Exeter (Lord William Cecil), writing in the Diocesan Gazette, saj’s: —“ Rumours have reached me that there is a movement in Britain to establish clinics which shall encourage that terrible race suicide which has already reduced France to comparative impotence and now threatens our beloved country. Too often religion and science find themselves opposed to ope another, but in this matter, at any rate with regard to our own country, religion and science are at one. Except for a small section of Christians who have, only in my lifetime, changed over to believing in race suicide, Christianity has always taught * that the great object of marriage 'was to encourage the procreation of children. We always pray for it in the marriage service* of our Prayer Book; and the Roman Catholids who, after all, are the vast majority of Christians in the world, have never varied in their denunciation of this practice of birth control. If Christianity has condemned it through all those ages, Christianity has, in this matter, the support of the Jewish religion. which is equally opposed to ft. “ If we turn from religion to science wo find that, according to the great Darwinian theory, the whole evolution of the world has been accomplished by the survival of the fittest. Few Englishmen would deny that their own race was the fittest, but even a foreigner would have to allow that if it vms not the fittest, it-was at least one of the’fittest. If it is the fittest, or one of the fittest races, to f encourage race suicide is not only a crime against the nation, but a crime against humanity and must be condemned by science. However mush I condemn race suicide, I have the greatest sympathy with people who find in the present economic distress great difficulty in bringing up a large family, just ap I have the most intense admiration for those who, not studying their own comfort ani pleasure, make great sacrifices to raise a numerous family, though every sacrifice they >make may bring to them a reward beybnd their expectation, for n* one can tell how great their children ma» be, how useful to humanity.”