labourers is by so much the richer and the more powerful than he who has

but one; while the state whose women are prolific and labour for and rear
their children stands so far insured against destruction. Incessant and

persistent child-bearing is thus truly the highest duty and the most
socially esteemed occupation of the primitive woman, equalling fully in

social importance the labour of the man as hunter and warrior.
Even under those conditions of civilisation which have existed in the

centuries which divide primitivesavagery from high civilisation, the
demand for continuous, unbroken child-bearing on the part of the woman as

her loftiest social duty has generally been hardly less imperious.
Throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, and down almost to our own day, the

rate of infantmortality was almost as large as in a savage state; medical
ignorance destroyed innumerable lives; antiseptic surgery being unknown,

serious wounds were still almost always fatal; in the low state of sanitary
science, plagues such as those which in the reign of Justinian swept across

the civilised world from India to Northern Europe, well nigh depopulating
the globe, or the Black Death of 1349, which in England alone swept away

more than half the population of the island, were but extreme forms of the
destruction of population going on continually as the result of zymotic

disease; while wars were not merely far more common but, owing to the
famines which almost invariably followed them, were far more destructive to

human life than in our own days, and deaths by violence, whether at the
hands of the state or as the result of personal enmity, were of daily

occurrence in all lands. Under these conditions abstinence on the part of
woman from incessant child-bearing might have led to almost the same

serious diminution or even extinction of her people, as in the savage
state; while the very existence of her civilisation depended on the

production of an immense number of individuals as beasts of burden, without
the expenditure of whose crude muscular force in physical labour of

agriculture and manufacture those intermediate civilisations would, in the
absence of machinery, have been impossible. Twenty men had to be born, fed

at the breast, and reared by women to perform the crude brute labour which
is performed today by one small, well-adjusted steam crane; and the demand

for large masses of human creatures as mere reservoirs of motor force for
accomplishing the simplest processes was imperative. So strong, indeed,

was the consciousness of the importance to society of continuous child-
bearing on the part of woman, that as late as the middle of the sixteenth

century Martin Luther wrote: "If a woman becomes weary or at last dead
from bearing, that matters not; let her only die from bearing, she is there

to do it;" and he doubtless gave expression, in a crude and somewhat brutal
form, to a conviction common to the bulk of his contemporaries, both male

and female.
Today, this condition has almost completely reversed itself.

The advance of science and the amelioration of the physical conditions of
life tend rapidly toward a diminution of human mortality. The infant

death-rate among the upper classes in modern civilisations has fallen by
more than one-half; while among poorer classes it is already, though

slowly, falling: the increased knowledge of the laws of sanitation has
made among all highly civilised peoples the depopulation by plague a thing

of the past, and the discoveries of the next twenty or thirty years will
probably do away for ever with the danger to man of zymotic disease.

Famines of the old desolating type have become an impossibility where rapid
means of transportationconvey the superfluity of one land to supply the

lack of another; and war and deeds of violence, though still lingering
among us, have already become episodal in the lives of nations as of

individuals; while the vast advances in antiseptic surgery have caused even
the effects of wounds and dismemberments to become only very partially

fatal to human life. All these changes have tended to diminish human
mortality and protract human life; and they have today already made it

possible for a race not only to maintain its numbers, but even to increase
them, with a comparatively small expenditure of woman's vitality in the

passive labour of child-bearing.
But yet more seriously has the demand for woman's labour as child-bearer

been diminished by change in another direction.
Every mechanicalinvention which lessens the necessity for rough,

untrained, muscular, human labour, diminishes also the social demand upon
woman as the producer in large masses of such labourers. Already

throughout the modern civilised world we have reached a point at which the
social demand is not merely for human creatures in the bulk for use as

beasts of burden, but, rather, and only, for such human creatures as shall
be so trained and cultured as to be fitted for the performance of the more

complex duties of modern life. Not, now, merely for many men, but, rather,
for few men, and those few, well born and well instructed, is the modern

demand. And the woman who today merely produces twelve children and
suckles them, and then turns them loose on her society and family, is

regarded, and rightly so, as a curse and down draught, and not the
productive labourer, of her community. Indeed, so difficult and expensive

has become in the modern world the rearing and training of even one
individual, in a manner suited to fit it for coping with the complexities

and difficulties of civilised life, that, to the family as well as to the
state, limited" target="_blank" title="a.无限的；过渡的">unlimited fecundity on the part of the female has already, in most

cases, become irremediable evil; whether it be in the case of the artisan,
who at the cost of immense self-sacrifice must support and train his

children till their twelfth or fourteenth year, if they are ever to become
even skilledmanual labourers, and who if his family be large often sinks

beneath the burden, allowing his offspring, untaught and untrained, to
become waste products of human life; or, in that of the professional man,

who by his mental toil is compelled to support and educate, at immense
expense, his sons till they are twenty or older, and to sustain his

daughters, often throughout their whole lives should they not marry, and to
whom a large family proves often no less disastrous; while the state whose

women produce recklessly large masses of individuals in excess of those for
whom they can provide instruction and nourishment is a state, in so far,

tending toward deterioration. The commandment to the modern woman is now
not simply "Thou shalt bear," but rather, "Thou shalt not bear in excess of

thy power to rear and train satisfactorily;" and the woman who should today
appear at the door of a workhouse or the tribunal of the poor-law guardians

followed by her twelve infants, demanding honourable sustenance for them
and herself in return for the labour she had undergone in producing them,

would meet with but short shrift. And the modern man who on his wedding-
day should be greeted with the ancient good wish, that he might become the

father of twenty sons and twenty daughters, would regard it as a
malediction rather than a blessing. It is certain that the time is now

rapidly approaching when child-bearing will be regarded rather as a lofty
privilege, permissible only to those who have shown their power rightly to

train and provide for their offspring, than a labour which in itself, and
under whatever conditions performed, is beneficial to society. (The

difference between the primitive and modern view on this matter is aptly
and quaintly illustrated by two incidents. Seeing a certain Bantu woman

who appeared better cared for, less hard worked, and happier than the mass
of her companions, we made inquiry, and found that she had two impotent

brothers; because of this she herself had not married, but had borne by
different men fourteen children, all of whom when grown she had given to

her brothers. "They are fond of me because I have given them so many
children, therefore I have not to work like the other women; and my

brothers give me plenty of mealies and milk," she replied, complacently,
when questioned, "and our family will not die out." And this person, whose

conduct was so emphatically anti-social on all sides when viewed from the
modern standpoint, was evidently regarded as pre-eminently of value to her

family and to society because of her mere fecundity. On the other hand, a
few weeks back appeared an account in the London papers of an individual

who, taken up at the East End for some brutal offence, blubbered out in
court that she was the mother of twenty children. "You should be ashamed

of yourself!" responded the magistrate; "a woman capable of such conduct
would be capable of doing anything!" and the fine was remorselessly

inflicted. Undoubtedly, if somewhat brutally, the magistrate yet gave true
voice to the modern view on the subject of excessive and reckless child-

bearing.)
Further, owing partly to the diminished demand for child-bearing, rising

from the extreme difficulty and expense of rearing and education, and to
many other complex social causes, to which we shall return later, millions

of women in our modern societies are so placed as to be absolutely
compelled to go through life not merely childless, but without sex

relationship in any form whatever; while another mighty army of women is
reduced by the dislocations of our civilisation to accepting sexual

relationships which practically negate child-bearing, and whose only
product is physical and moral disease.

Thus, it has come to pass that vast numbers of us are, by modern social
conditions, prohibited from child-bearing at all; and that even those among