The answer to this question depends on a further question. To what extent is the relative sterility of the professional and skilled working classes attributable to the heavy taxation now imposed on them, and to the rise in the cost of living due to the war, and to what extent is it the result of a preference shown by many people for a more or less luxurious life, with few or no children, to a simpler life with several children? In other words, to what extent is it attributable to an economic factor and to what extent to motives of selfishness? To what extent does that quality of self-interest play a part which prompts a woman to refuse to breastfeed her baby because she is afraid of the effects thereof upon her figure, which causes her to abstain from having children because she dislikes the discomfort and deformity preliminary to, and the actual pains of, childbirth, or which makes her value amusements and expensive forms of pleasure and recreation more highly than the experience of maternity? To what extent is the relative infertility of the upper and middle classes accounted for by the kind of egotism which induces the husband to go in for entertaining, for a motor, and a house with several servants, and generally to live in comparative affluence rather than do without his superfluities and bring up a family of children? This attitude nowadays certainly plays a part. Dissatisfaction with the elementary pleasures of life, the craving after artificial stimuli and new sensations, have always been, and probably will always remain, the surest way to decadence in a race, and as such should be combated. It is more in the interest of the race that the professional and artisan classes should produce plenty of good children than that the families of the very poor should be restricted. The argument is sometimes advanced by complacent and wealthy individuals that the working classes should be encouraged to reproduce freely in order to keep up the country’s numbers. The dirty work is thrown, so to speak, on the shoulders of those least qualified to discharge it. It must appeal to the sense of justice of everyone that if the maintenance of numbers of the race is to be conceived as a burden (which of course it should not), the burden should be borne equally by all classes.