I was visiting the north of England in connection with an Industrial Congress, and I called upon a woman whose husband worked in a mine. Her small house was scrupulously clean, she was young, vigorous, swift in thought and movement, and gave me the impression that nothing came into her life in the form of obstacle and surprise without finding her ready to deal with it effectively. She showed me with a certain pride the small collection of books on social subjects bought in second-hand shops by her and her husband. I remember seeing John Stuart Mill, Ruskin, William Morris, Rowntree, Henry George, and many another familiar name. "We have read them together," she told me, "we have educated one another since the time we first met at evening classes." I remarked that her married life seemed to lack one thing only, and that was a family, and I quoted the Eastern aphorism that a house without children is a garden without flowers. She smiled a little sadly, and then I noted how some faint lines about her mouth tightened and hardened, robbing her of a certain charm. "Lady Warwick," she said, "we earn between us by hard work from day to day between four and five pounds a week. It has taken many years to reach that figure, and there is no chance of passing beyond it. What we have endured on the road to this comparative comfort we alone know, and we don't talk about it. But we both believe that the game is not worth the candle. The conditions of life in England are not worth perpetuating, and neither of us would willingly bring children into the world to take their chance and run their horrible risks as we did." She stopped for a moment in order to be sure of her self-control, and then she told me that in her view, though all her heart cried out for little children, sterility was the only protest that could be made against the cruel conditions of modern life under capitalism. "I know that my husband and I are desirables from the employer's standpoint. We earn far more than we receive, we are temperate, hard-working, punctual, reliable. But when we have settled our rent and rates, clubs, and insurances, dressed ourselves, paid tram fares and bought a few books, there is nothing left but a slender margin that a few months' illness would sweep away. For a week or ten days a year we may learn that England is not all as hideous as this corner of it, but we shall die without a glimpse of the world beyond and of its treasures that our books tell us about. If we stop to think, our life is full of unsatisfied longings, and though we don't give them free play we can't ignore them altogether. So we will not produce any more slaves for the capitalist, and I can tell you that there is not one decently educated, young married woman of my acquaintance who is not of the same mind. You could go into a score of houses known to me in this town alone and find strong, vigorous women whose childlessness is their one possible protest against the existing wage slavery."

Years have passed since, in that gloomy little northern town with its congeries of mean streets looking meaner than ever under the rain, I met the speaker whose name has passed from me. She may well be approaching the time when Nature will confirm her resolve irrevocably, but the memory of that conversation has haunted me with the vision of thousands of lost souls and unhappy lives.

I know now, if I did not know it then, that the music of little voices and the patter of little feet would have brought into that poor worker's life many of the joys for which she sighed in vain. She did not know, nor at that time did I, that obedience to natural law ensures a happiness that is independent of external circumstances, while disobedience brings in its train an ever-growing mental discord and sows the seeds of disease and decay. Statistics can be fascinating friends even though they be formidable acquaintances; they have a rough eloquence of their own that is more effective than honeyed speech.

The birth-rate of England, France, and the United States, associated as it is in all these countries with the death-rate of the newly born, is to me one of the most depressing signs of the times. I cannot help realising that in many cases sterility is not the deliberate protest of the wage slave, it is the selfish protest of the pleasure seeker, and in a small minority of cases the genuine, yet narrow, fear of the eugenist and his following whose enthusiasms have outrun both knowledge and faith. Tolstoy went so far as to say that the man who enjoys association with his wife for any purpose save procreation is guilty of a crime. While many childless women live celibate lives, particularly in America, the great majority do not. In Milton's stately words they "of love and love's delight take freely," as though the power that rules and guides the world could in the long run be outwitted by what it has created.

To-day the civilised world is at the parting of the ways. War has riven asunder the ranks of the best and bravest, and has left in the hearts of the survivors so vivid a sense of the horrors of life that many a man will hesitate to become a father lest his sons have to take their place in time to come on the fields of war and his daughters chance to be among the dwellers in a conquered city. All classes have been gathered to battle, one and all will feel the responsibility attending the failure of our civilisation. While many will believe they are responding to a high instinct when they elect to follow the line of least resistance and leave the world a little poorer, the cumulative effect of such a decision is positively terrible to contemplate.

There are some lines in Coriolanus that might have been addressed not to those who banished him from Rome, but to the women of the world's most highly civilised countries:—

If these lines are really as appropriate as they seem to me, it is because the women of the civilised world and the more leisured section of it are on their trial. There is going to be an unimagined shortage among the best elements of the most highly civilised population, a shortage due in part to the fashion in which responsible women have neglected their duties hitherto. If the pleasure lovers decline their share of child-bearing on the ground that it robs them of long periods of amusement, and if the finest type of women workers refuse on the other grounds raised earlier in this paper, what will be the result? There will be a sharp social cleavage, the few clever exploiters will enchain the unfit who are produced so rapidly, we shall develop a small class that governs and a large class that is ruled, all progress will come to an end, while the conditions obtaining when the industrial era was opened by steam power will be revived with all the attendant horrors in some new and unsuspected guise.

It is well to remember how, following the first trumpet call of war, our hard-won liberties were stripped from us. Some of my American friends say it is because our free institutions were not very deeply rooted, but I am well convinced that if the United States were involved, the results would be much the same. War always dethrones Liberty, and the nation that can set her up again when peace is restored may be congratulated. As a rule the struggle has to begin all over again, for the State advances claims that are incompatible with any kind of freedom that is worth having. Only the will of the people can gain liberty, and to make that will sufficiently strong and effective it must be expressed by the best human material, the children of the best types. So it seems to me that race suicide, evil at all times, becomes in seasons like this an act of treason, not only to the nation but to civilisation and all those ideals upon which civilisation waits.

In the town to which I referred on the first page of this paper, the women who deliberately discarded motherhood might between them have raised a strong company to fight for the rights of the next generation. They were shocked to consider the travail that brought them beyond the reach of want, had they lost sympathy with those who succumbed by the way? Is not the fate of these last the more tragic?

The faults and failures of life are not a divine dispensation. Providence has placed us in a marvellous world, capable of raising far more than is needed to supply the reasonable wants of one and all. That there are misery, injustice, want and inequality must not be charged to the account of Providence, but to the foolishness and immortal greed of man, who cannot deal equitably with the resources of which he is the trustee. The world waxes richer year by year, for we are gathering the power to increase production and to distribute the surplus of one region to supply the deficiency of another. It is a very fair and beautiful world, and we need no more than that all should be permitted to share what is produced. To enforce this distribution, to see that it is enjoyed in peace and tranquillity is the appointed task of a strong and vigorous democracy. The primal duty of women is to give this democracy to the world and keep its strength renewed.

Some may fear that women "condemned to fertility" as one phrased it in my hearing recently, may be unable to take their part in the struggle for emancipation. But surely motherhood enforces the qualifications of women, justifies their claims and provides them with the material to train for future triumphs. Olive Schreiner, in her magnificent book "Woman and Labour," in which, however, she wrote of the birth-rate and its incidents without visualising the possibilities of world war, says that some birds have raised the union of the sexes to a far higher level than humanity has reached. The male and the female share the nest building, the incubation and the feeding of the young, and it was impossible for that fine observer to note any difference in the task of the sexes. So it should be with us and will be when we have developed to that standard. The labours and responsibilities of the home, and the daily work will be a part of the common contract and bond of men and women, and no woman will be disqualified by the fulfilment of her duties in the home more than the man is disqualified by reason of his labours beyond it. We are all conscious of evils that throng the world, we all strive to better them in a degree, few of the most careless fail altogether to be kind in some fashion, however haphazard, but if the women who take life seriously will not only fulfil the commandment to be fruitful and multiply, but will do their best to urge their reluctant sisters, a single generation may avail to restore the balance of sanity, equity and progress throughout civilisation.

This social disease of race suicide has not been long established. It came into France, I believe, as a result of the law that divides the inheritance of the parents among the children equally, it has crept into England and America chiefly as a product of overmuch luxury and wealth. Apart from such a reason as calculated protest against social inequalities, it is due to the methods of life that soften women and make child-bearing a terror. I have been told by my travelled friends, the men and women who have been to the far ends of the earth, that in the lands where women are hardy, healthy, and vigorous, there is no trouble for the mother at these critical times. She recovers her full strength in a few days. At Easton, in Essex, where I was born and brought up, and at Warwick, where I have lived so much since my marriage, I have seen that the workers' wives who live frugally and actively are able to rear large families and retain not only their health, but their good looks. Casting my memory back I can recall the time when great families were the rule, and not the exception, among the leisured classes. The women who entertained in great houses that they administered in every detail, brought their six, eight, or ten children into the world and lived long, healthy, happy lives. The modern fashion is of recent date, and now that the war has stirred the heights and depths of human consciousness the old bad custom should pass, for the sake of a world that the madmen of mankind have made desolate. At no period in the history of Western civilisation, has it been more necessary for the women who count as factors in world progress to consider their duty and fulfil it to the extreme limit of their power.

I think that the need of the United States is not less than our own, for it sees the influx day by day of the most diverse elements, and knows well enough that the genius of rule belongs to the Anglo-Saxon. The negroid element does not forget its duty, and the honest class of immigrant that seeks to share the benefit of an enlightened civilisation is hardly less prolific. Against all the problems that my American friends, and they are many, have set out, there is no surer safeguard than an ever increasing birth-rate of the best elements.

I have never felt disposed to join in the cry of the Yellow Peril, nor to think well of those who raise it wantonly, but certain facts stand out in a very bright light shed upon them by the war. In the first place the Allied powers of the Entente have sought the services of both yellow and black races, and have by so doing proclaimed the dawn of a new era in which all questions of equality must come to the front. Japan is very wide awake, and China is still a slumbering giant. Given sanitary science and a great gift of organisation, she might rule all Asia. The Berbers, Arabs, and negroid races of Africa have lined our trenches and taken part in our attacks; one and all, to say nothing of the Indian soldiers, have learned more of war in the past year or so than they had ever known before. They have seen the weakness as well as the strength of the white man.

Black and yellow races alike are extraordinarily prolific; there is among their women no shirking of duty in that regard. Very soon the white man will realise that he cannot maintain his old position unless he is fully prepared to accept responsibilities far greater than those of his forebears. If the rate of his progression falls while that of the other races rises, there can only be one solution in the end, such a solution as "Coriolanus" speaks of in the scathing lines I have quoted. In short, if the white man's burden is to be borne there must be sufficient white men to bear it. Statesmen will labour in vain and the friends of progress will strive to no end if the start that the other races have gained is to be increased, and the white women of the world must decide whether or no they are content that not only their own nation but the whole standard of life for which they stand is to be submerged, or whether by a generous interpretation of the duties of motherhood they will enable their people to remain in the future as they have been in the past. We cannot tell what the final harvest of war will amount to, but with the dead, the diseased and the disabled, it will probably run into ten figures, more than five times the measure of human sacrifice demanded by all the great wars that shook the world from Blenheim to Omdurman. Even these monstrous figures do not tell the whole tale, for there will be among the dead, thousands of men whose talent might have developed into genius, and there will be hundreds of thousands of widows left in the full flush of womanhood, with all their possibilities unfulfilled, and, in countless cases, beyond the reach of fulfilment. To put it brutally, our civilisation that stands in bitter need of its best breeding stock has deliberately slaughtered a very large percentage of it.

This, indeed, is race suicide in its worst form, and just as woman hopes by her emancipation to dam the tide of war, so she must step into the breach and dam the tide of loss. Emancipation will do very little for women if when they have obtained it they find the best elements of the white races increasingly unable to stand the strain imposed by war. They will not forget that the black man's women are bought to tend his land and enable him to live in ease or that the Mohammedan in the enforced seclusion of the harem may share his favours among four lawful wives and as many concubines as his purse can furnish. As the standard of civilisation declines, woman, by reason of her physical weakness, must pay an ever increasing penalty; only when it has risen to heights unreached before the war may she hope to come into her own and to realise ambitions that, dormant or active, have been with her through the centuries. The whole question of her future has been brought by the war outside the domain of personal or even national interests, suddenly it has become racial.

Down to a little while ago the solution was not in woman's hands, to-day it belongs to her, she has to decide not only for herself, but for all white mankind. It is not too much to say that civilisation, as we know it, will soon be waiting upon her verdict. If this statement seems too far reaching, if it seems to challenge probability, let those who think so turn to any good history of the world and see for themselves how each civilisation has been overwhelmed as soon as it reached the limits of its efficiency and endurance. In the history of this planet, changes no less sweeping than that which I have indicated have been recorded, the Providence that has one race or colour in its special keeping is but the offspring of our own conceit. The real Providence that dominates the universe treats all the races on their merits. If, and only if, the best types of women will embrace motherhood ardently, bravely content to endure the discomforts and discover for themselves the infinite pleasure, can the earth, as we know it, survive the terrible shock it has received. Even then the recovery will be slow, and the price to be paid will be bitter beyond imagining, but we shall in the end win through, though I who write and you who read may well have settled our account with mortality before the season of full recovery dawns upon a wasted world. Should we fail in our duty then we must pass as Babylon and Egypt and Rome passed before us, to become no more than mere shadows of a name.

The least among us may dream dreams and see visions. My own dream and my own vision are of woman as the saviour of the race. I see her fruitful womb replenish the wasted ranks, I hear her wise counsels making irresistibly attractive the flower-strewn ways of peace. I see the few women who encourage war turning from the error of their ways, and those who have spurned motherhood realising before it is too late the glory of their neglected burden. And I believe with a faith that nothing can shake that with these two changes and a wise recognition that the fruits of the earth were given to us all not in accordance with our gifts, but in the measure of our needs, a new season may come to this distracted world. Should all the high hopes of our noblest suffer eclipse, should all the travail of the Christian era be brought to nothingness? I have too much faith in my sex to believe it will let the world perish if the real meaning and significance of its duty can be brought home to it. We have been ill educated, we have been spoilt, we have been corrupted, but for all that there is a certain soundness at the heart of woman. She has not shrunk from the duties she understands, even the lapse from grace that recent years have revealed will not outlive this understanding.

The responsibility for spreading the truth rests upon all who recognise it. There are countless women throughout the world who by sheer force of character can influence their women friends and have learned that the vital problem of sex is not rightly to be treated as though it were not fit for discussion. They are scattered over all the cities of the world; the cumulative effect of their labours would be immense, irresistible. I am sure that the perils I have outlined are known and feared in the Old World and the New, that they are mentioned in the highest quarters of London, Paris, and Washington, and that the transitional period separating words from deeds must needs be brief because the problem does not brook delay. Many women will respond without questioning to the call of duty. Some, whose life struggle can be understood only by those who share it, may ask first that their offspring shall be treated as what they are, State assets, and not abandoned to all the evils of poverty. Others will want to know that they are not raising sons to become the "cannon fodder" of kings and statesmen. In the light of the needs of the white man's world, and the weight of the white man's burden, are even these assurances too much to ask?