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?