But whether the family numbers one or six, it is all one to Father Bernard Vaughan, who in his violent attack on modern parents draws no distinction between the rich man who has but one child and the hard-working professional man who has several. To limit one’s family at all is in his eyes a heinous and revolting sin, ‘a vile practice,’ and people who do it are ‘traitors to an all-important clause in the sacred contract which they called upon God to witness they meant to keep.’ This last is hardly logical—none of us are responsible for the wording of the marriage service, and we cannot very well interrupt the recital of its barbaric formulæ to explain that there are limitations to our desire for multiplication.

Father Vaughan also says that this disinclination to multiply means ‘the extinction of Christian morality,’ and constitutes ‘defiance of God.’ It is not clear to me why a respectable middle-class couple who decide that three children is a more suitable number than twelve or fourteen for an income of, say, £300 a year, should be accused of defying God by this exercise of common-sense and self-control. Is the idea that the children will only be sent if the Almighty wishes us to have them, and it is therefore impious to regulate the number? It would be just as fair to accuse a young woman who refuses several offers of marriage of defying God, since He clearly wishes her to marry. Bodily ills and accidents presumably come from the same divine agency, yet no one thinks it sinful to seek to remedy these with the means science has provided for the purpose. Why are the means of regulating families made known to us if we are not to use them when population-pressure becomes acute? The doctrine of Free-will becomes a positive farce if Father Vaughan is right. If he confined his remarks to people who deliberately refuse to have any children, he would have found many adherents, but he alienates our sympathy by the very excess of his denunciation. He even brands as immoral the practice of regulating the time between the births of children, which is so essential to the mother’s health. Apparently he would think it right for a woman to have a baby every eleven months or so, irrespective of her husband’s limited income, until she became an ailing wreck or died of over-production, leaving her family in the plight of being motherless. His remarks are of course directed principally at ‘smart’ society people, but as Father Vaughan considers lack of means no excuse for ‘deliberate regulation of the marriage state,’ his strictures must be taken as applying to all alike. One feels inclined to echo with a character in The Merry-Go-Round: ‘In this world it is the good people who do all the harm.’

I learn that as long ago as 1872, before there was any perceptible fall in the birth-rate to consider, an article by Mr Montagu Crackenthorpe, Q.C., appeared in The Fortnightly Review, contending that small families were a sign of progress rather than of retrogression. This article was recently republished in a book entitled Population and Progress. There are many other books on the subject, and to them I must refer those of my readers who desire further knowledge of this very important problem. I have no space for an exhaustive consideration of it here. It is a subject essentially considered by the majority from a narrow, personal point of view, for it is impossible to expect people struggling for existence to ‘think imperially,’ and put the needs of the Empire before the limitations of their income. The question from the economic standpoint has been exhaustively dealt with by that master of political economy, Mr Sidney Webb in a pamphlet entitled The Decline of the Birth Rate, published by the Fabian Society at 1d.

I wish I could convince people, however, of the mistake of having only one child. The loss to the parents is heavy and to the child incalculable. All parents who have tried it know what disadvantages they experience in their early attempts at training, when there is ‘no one to play with,’ and no one to give up to—perhaps the most important of life’s lessons. Two or more children growing up together are twice as easy to manage and to teach as is one alone, and infinitely happier in every way. Later on, schoolfellows to a certain extent supply the deficiency, but the only child is still no less an object for commiseration, as are his parents. All their hopes are centred in the one, and, as the circumstances almost inevitably combine to spoil the one, their hopes are more or less handicapped. Parents find out too late that they have made a mistake.

I was at a children’s party not long ago where ‘sole hopes’ were greatly in the majority. A lovely little family trio consisting of a boy and two tiny girls was much admired and the mother openly envied. Several of the mothers present said they often wished that Joan or Tommy had a brother or sister. As few of the children mentioned were over five, the difficulty did not seem insuperable, but opinions were unanimous among the ladies that it was ‘too late to start the nursery again’; ‘it was no good unless the two could grow up together, five years was too great a gap,’ and so on. No doubt they will one day bitterly regret their timidity, as many women to my personal knowledge have already done. Joan or Tommy may be taken from them, or what is worse may turn out unloving and undutiful, and in that sad day they will have no other children to turn to.

If the facile writers of those endless newspaper articles on the degeneracy of modern women really wish to make good their case, they had better abandon their foolish complaints as to women’s inability to manage the spinning-wheel or preserve pickles, and other tasks which the progress of machinery have rendered unnecessary. Let them instead turn their attention for proof of degeneracy to the strange helplessness of middle-class mothers in training their children, and their dread of nursery complications. I know many a woman whose financial ability and capacity for organising almost amounts to genius, who would doubtless not be at a loss in dealing with a burglar, yet who would on no account face the terrors of a longish railway journey in sole charge of her two-year-old child, whilst to ‘take the baby at night’ once in a way during the nurse’s absence from home is a nerve-shattering experience which necessitates at least one day’s complete rest in bed afterwards.

‘To start the nursery again,’ with all its complicated machinery, when the sole hope has got over its teething torments, can walk, feed itself, and generally be companionable, is a prospect before which modern mothers seem to quail. The remedy is to multiply the number of hopes before the nursery has time to be outgrown by Hope No. 1, in fact to keep the nursery going a good many years longer than is nowadays fashionable—though by no means for the unlimited period advised by Father Vaughan and other celibate priests entirely ignorant of nurseries and their exigences!

[III]
PARENTHOOD: THE HIGHEST DESTINY

‘O happy husband! happy wife!

The rarest blessing Heaven drops down