unwisely or was born of poor parents, or was seen wearing a frock-coat in combination with a bowler, or confessed he doubted the Apostles’ Creed, or called himself a Socialist, or any disgraceful thing like that, so many years ago.  It is that sort of thing “Kappa” must invert if he wants a change in our public schools.  You may arrange and rearrange curricula, abolish Greek, substitute “science”—­it will not matter a rap.  Even those model canoes of yours, “Kappa,” will be wasted if you still insist upon model schoolmasters.  So long as we require our schoolmasters to be politic, conforming, undisturbing men, setting up Polonius as an ideal for them, so long will their influence deaden the souls of our sons.

THE ENDOWMENT OF MOTHERHOOD

Some few years ago the Fabian Society, which has been so efficient in keeping English Socialism to the lines of “artfulness and the ’eighties,” refused to have anything to do with the Endowment of Motherhood.  Subsequently it repented and produced a characteristic pamphlet in which the idea was presented with a sort of minimising furtiveness as a mean little extension of outdoor relief.  These Fabian Socialists, instead of being the daring advanced people they are supposed to be, are really in many things twenty years behind the times.  There need be nothing shamefaced about the presentation of the Endowment of Motherhood.  There is nothing shameful about it.  It is a plain and simple idea for which the mind of the man in the street has now been very completely prepared.  It has already crept into social legislation to the extent of thirty shillings.

I suppose if one fact has been hammered into us in the past two decades more than any other it is this:  that the supply of children is falling off in the modern State; that births, and particularly good-quality births, are not abundant enough; that the birth-rate, and particularly the good-class birth-rate, falls steadily below the needs of our future.

If no one else has said a word about this important matter, ex-President Roosevelt would have sufficed to shout it to the ends of the earth.  Every civilised community is drifting towards “race-suicide” as Rome drifted into “race-suicide” at the climax of her empire.

Well, it is absurd to go on building up a civilisation with a dwindling supply of babies in the cradles—­and these not of the best possible sort—­and so I suppose there is hardly an intelligent person in the English-speaking communities who has not thought of some possible remedy—­from the naive scoldings of Mr. Roosevelt and the more stolid of the periodicals to sane and intelligible legislative projects.