But whether the family numbers one or six, it is all one to Father Bernard Vaughan, who in his violent attack on modern parents draws no distinction between the rich man who has but one child and the hard-working professional man who has several. To limit one’s family at all is in his eyes a heinous and revolting sin, ‘a vile practice,’ and people who do it are ‘traitors to an all-important clause in the sacred contract which they called upon God to witness they meant to keep.’ This last is hardly logical--none of us are responsible for the wording of the marriage service, and we cannot very well interrupt the recital of its barbaric formulæ to explain that there are limitations to our desire for multiplication. Father Vaughan also says that this disinclination to multiply means ‘the extinction of Christian morality,’ and constitutes ‘defiance of God.’ It is not clear to me why a respectable middle-class couple who decide that three children is a more suitable number than twelve or fourteen for an income of, say, £300 a year, should be accused of defying God by this exercise of common-sense and self-control. Is the idea that the children will only be sent if the Almighty wishes us to have them, and it is therefore impious to regulate the number? It would be just as fair to accuse a young woman who refuses several offers of marriage of defying God, since He clearly wishes her to marry. Bodily ills and accidents presumably come from the same divine agency, yet no one thinks it sinful to seek to remedy these with the means science has provided for the purpose. Why are the means of regulating families made known to us if we are not to use them when population-pressure becomes acute? The doctrine of Free-will becomes a positive farce if Father Vaughan is right. If he confined his remarks to people who deliberately refuse to have _any_ children, he would have found many adherents, but he alienates our sympathy by the very excess of his denunciation. He even brands as immoral the practice of regulating the time between the births of children, which is so essential to the mother’s health. Apparently he would think it right for a woman to have a baby every eleven months or so, irrespective of her husband’s limited income, until she became an ailing wreck or died of over-production, leaving her family in the plight of being motherless. His remarks are of course directed principally at ‘smart’ society people, but as Father Vaughan considers lack of means no excuse for ‘deliberate regulation of the marriage state,’ his strictures must be taken as applying to all alike. One feels inclined to echo with a character in _The Merry-Go-Round_: ‘In this world it is the good people who do all the harm.’