If this be the ideal of the State, life is of less value than the product of labour, for it can be more easily and readily replaced.
But the ideal of the perfect state is not wealth but the robust happiness of its members.
The happiness of its members is best promoted by the maximum increase in its numbers, consistent with ample space and food. With ample space and food multiplication works automatically, being kept up to the limit of space and food by the procreative instinct.
If it can be shown that multiplication is not sufficiently stimulated by this instinct, then it must be concluded that, in the minds of the citizens the space and food are not ample.
In New Zealand the procreative impulse does not keep multiplication at an equal pace with the apparent supply of food and space, and this is due, as has been shown, to the fact that our citizens are not satisfied that the supply is ample.
They have come to enlarge the definition of "food," and this term now includes luxuries easily obtainable for themselves and their families.
But the luxuries of life and living can only be easily obtained when individual effort to obtain them is unhampered. Every burden which a man has to bear (only the best are here referred to,—the fit members of the State) limits his power to provide for himself, and any he may bring into the world.
If the State decrees that a citizen shall support himself, his mate, and his progeny, well and good,—if he has no other burden to bear, no other responsibility, he knows exactly where he is and what he has to do, and directs his energies and controls his impulses, and enlarges his desires to suit his tastes and purposes.
But if the State decrees that a citizen shall not only support all for whose existence he is responsible, but also all those unable to support themselves, born into the world in increasing numbers as congenital defectives, and manufactured in the world by legalised drinking saloons, and by pauperising charitable aid and benevolent institutions, then our self-respecting right-respecting citizen must decide whether he will forego the luxury and ease that he may enjoy, and rear the normal family, or curtail his own progeny, and support the army of defectives thrown upon society by the State-encouraged fertility of the unfit.
It has already been shown, that in this colony the best fit to multiply are ceasing to do so, because of a desire to attain a social and financial stability that will protect them and their dependents from want or the prospect of want. There is every reason to believe, that when this stability is assured the normal family soon follows.