A sound nation has for its essential condition healthy children—yes, and many of them—and healthy mothers to bear and to rear them. We know this. But what are the facts? We find more and more young women turning away from motherhood. They are marrying in larger numbers just now, for war has turned men into heroes and this has made marriage popular. But we may not count too much on this, for no longer does marriage mean the bearing of children and the founding of a family. The wife no longer is comparable to the fruitful vine, no longer are children like olive plants about the table of the house. The blessings of the old sweet poem fail to stir our desires. Babies are not wanted. The volume of evidence and the observations made by the Commissioners’ Report of the National Birth-Rate Investigation, 1916, which lies upon my desk, cannot be read without a sense of almost hopeless depression. A dark picture is revealed of men and women harried and driven by the sex instinct within them; the relation of the husband and the wife made hateful from a perpetual fear of the natural consequences of birth. The struggle is but too clearly apparent in every section of society. The evidence discloses that the prevention of conception is growing steadily and rapidly, for though it began with and, for a time, was practised only by the well-to-do, it is now spreading downwards to the poorest, amongst whom the practice of abortion has for long been extensively used. Dr. Mary Scharlieb, whose report is, perhaps, the most interesting of all the Commissioners, states that in the working classes there are five abortions to every one live birth. What sordid facts this Report reveals! What a failure it proves our life! Is there any use in talking of raising the birth-rate until these things are changed? Is our land fit to receive the children? Has not the child the right to demand from its parents that its birth shall be looked on as something more than an unfortunate mistake?