An enormous amount of good can be done by the personal efforts and example of those in a position to influence others--pastors, doctors, Christian layworkers. Yet is it an impossible hope that some day a league or confraternity to fight the battle may be started? Are there no people of sufficient weight and importance in the world’s eye to come forward and do this, no folk whose place will secure them a hearing, whose convictions will interest and convert others? Eighteen months ago I published, in my book _First it was Ordained_, the sketch of an organized society on definite lines. In the course of the tale the founder of this league writes to an official in the Census Office who is alarmed at the decline of the birth-rate, and outlines the lines on which the society is to be started. With some necessary elisions this is the letter:-- “You will see, therefore, that though there has been, and doubtless will continue to be, a great deal of windy talk on these matters, there is no organized body of men and women, no league, no union, either religious or political or both, which is devoted to dealing with the question, to rousing the national conscience and fighting the Neo-Malthusians tooth and nail. “Wifehood--which generally means motherhood--is the predominant profession of women all over the world. The future of the world, and of course of any state in it, rests upon the quality and the quantity of its children. A prominent sociologist has just written, ‘If the conditions under which the profession of motherhood is exercised are silly and rotten, our fleets, our armies, do no more than guard a thing that dies. In Great Britain, now, I think they are more or less silly and rotten.’ Let us admit that this writer is correct. He does no more than voice conclusions at which even the most superficial student of the census returns must have arrived. “What is to be done, then? How are we who are Christians and love our Lord, citizens who love our country, to fight the present conditions? “That is what a band of people, including those I have mentioned, are discussing. They have arrived at a definite conclusion. “A great league is to be formed of English men and women. Great names will be at the head of it, it is to be national. I have already pointed out to you that even the revelations of the census have not stirred the ordinary person. His patriotism has not been roused, and, you may be certain--as I am certain--that no question of national expediency on this point _will_ stir the ordinary person, who is either indifferent or actually engaged in helping England’s decadence by the restriction of his own family. A league started on the grounds of expediency and the common good alone would be an egregious failure.