'Hour by hour I dream at the window here,
While footsteps trip and falter adown the street,
And I hear my children murmuring, "Mother, dear!"
And the voice of my husband crying, "Sweet, oh sweet!"'
But they who had the opportunity went out pursuing the mirage of pleasure, and they wanted no voices crying 'Mother, mother.' And these others were left with their hunger—left to 'clasp air and kiss the wind for ever.' For the modest never attained in the days when the vulgar and the blatant received the incense and the crown. It was because the pure were disregarded that the cult of the empty cradle cast the glamour of its degeneration over the land.
VII
In the so-called dark ages the mother and the child were an object of veneration if not of worship. Men thrilled with the sense of the sacredness of life because they feared God—the source of life. What the race needs is to go on pilgrimage back to the Manger—back to the Child. But, alas! the spiritually dead cannot go on pilgrimage. First the dead must be quickened. What we need most of all is to cleanse these self-filled, soiled hearts in the fountain of self-sacrifice. The soul of the race, if the race is to be saved, must go on pilgrimage back to the Manger—back to the Mother and the Child.
'And he who gives a child a home
Builds palaces in kingdom come.
And she who gives a baby birth
Brings Saviour Christ again to earth.'
When, last winter, the enemy poured into a trench, and almost all the defenders were killed, a French sergeant, grievously wounded, grasped a rifle and began to shoot, crying out to his semi-conscious comrades, 'Stand up, ye dead.' At the wild cry the wounded arose, and the half-dead began to shoot with unsteady hands. By a resurrection from the dead the trench was saved. To a race that has set its face towards decay, there ringeth from heaven the cry, 'Stand up, ye dead.' It is not yet too late to save the race, the empire, and the world.
[[1]] The Declining Birthrate, p. 247.
[[2]] The Declining Birthrate, p. 343.
[[3]] The Declining Birthrate, p. 93.