Crushed by the burden of taxation which they have not the resources to meet and to provide for children also: crushed by the national cost of the too numerous children of those who do not contribute to the public funds by taxation, yet who recklessly bring forth from an inferior stock individuals who are not self-supporting, the middle and superior artisan classes have, without perceiving it, come almost to take the position of that ancient slave population. It is only as a reward for their thrift and foresight, for their care and self-denial that they find themselves able (that is allowed by financial circumstances) to have one or perhaps two children. Hence by a strange parallel working of divers forces, the best, the thriftiest, the most serious-minded, the most desiring of parenthood are to-day those who are forced by circumstances into the position of the ancient slave and allowed to rear but one or two children as a result perhaps of a lifetime of valuable service and of loving union with a wife well fitted to bear more offspring. While on the other hand, society allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community, to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped, and inferior infants. If they live, a large proportion of these are doomed from their very physical inheritance to be at the best but partly self-supporting, and thus to drain the resources of those classes above them which have a sense of responsibility. The better classes, freed from the cost of the institutions, hospitals, prisons and so on, principally filled by the inferior stock, would be able to afford to enlarge their own families, and at the same time not only to save misery but to multiply a hundredfold the contribution in human life-value to the riches of the State. The immensity of the power of parenthood, both on the personal lives which it brings into existence, and on the community of which each individual is to form a part, is not yet perceived by our Statesmen in its true perspective.