Bernard Shaw says: ‘The artificial sterilisation of matrimony is the most revolutionary discovery of the nineteenth century.’ It certainly makes possible the revolutionary suggestions about marriage, or rather _would_ make them more feasible if the ‘discovery’ were universally put into practice. Let us take it then, that where children are desired no relaxation of our present marriage system is advisable, and that people who wish to experiment in new matrimonial schemes must resolutely avoid the ‘_cul-de-sac_ of all reforms,’ and remain childless. To beget or not to beget--that is the question nowadays, and a very vexed question it is. There is hardly a subject on which opinions are more diversified. Some people regard parenthood as the most horrible disaster; others think that to die without creating is to have lived uselessly. I heard a woman say once: ‘I hate children; it’s much better to keep a few dear dogs,’ and she was not an ignorant or devitalised girl, but a healthy, sensible, fully developed young woman of six-and-twenty. Not long ago another woman, in announcing her engagement to me, added in the same breath that she didn’t mean to have children on any account. Mr George Moore, in that sinister and repulsive book, _The Confessions of a Young Man_ says: ‘That I may die childless, that when my hour comes I may turn my face to the wall, saying, I have not increased the great evil of human life--then, though I were murderer, fornicator, thief, and liar, my sins shall melt even as a cloud. But he who dies with children about him, though his life were in all else an excellent deed, shall be held accursed by the truly wise, and the stain upon him shall endure for ever.’ (One wonders on reading this why Mr Moore continues to perpetuate the great evil of human life in his own person, when he could so easily end his existence without paining anyone!) But I have heard many people, both men and women, married and single, say that without children marriage is meaningless, in which opinion I heartily concur. More than one young woman dowered with generous blood, vitality, and courage has confided in me that whether she should marry or not she wished to be a mother at all costs. It is one of the disastrous results of men’s shrinking from matrimony that fine women like these must deliberately stifle this glorious passion of motherhood, or pay a terrible price for expressing it--a price exacted not only from themselves but from the child to whom they have given life. Such women, however, are not often met with.