B. That during the last ten or fifteen years of social legislation and of strenuous effort on the part of the working classes and social reformers, the purchasing power of average wages has declined instead of increasing, and this decline shows no definite sign of being arrested. In order to improve the efficiency of production, it is important that the efficiency of the race should be improved. Hence the reduction of births should be especially encouraged among the poor and those suffering from physical or mental defect or disease, who, it may be noted, should have the strongest personal motives for voluntary restriction. The restriction of births in proportion to economic or physiological deficiency would steadily improve economic conditions in the following ways: (a) It would immediately reduce the burden upon the poor with their existing wages. (b) It would immediately check increased demand, and therefore a further rise in price of food. (c) It would reduce the burden of charity and taxation. (d) It would permit the workers to be better nourished and educated. (e) It would permit the children to be better educated and technically trained. (f) In course of time it would reduce the number of workers competing and further raise wages. (g) The evils of overcrowding, with its serious hygienic and moral dangers, would be rapidly diminished, and the housing problem made easier of solution. A three bedroom house only provides decency for a family not exceeding four children. (h) It would give better opportunities for thrift among the workers and for their emancipation from the position of “wage slaves.” It would then give them an opportunity of co-operating and owning their own instruments of production. In support of these statements it may be recalled that in Prof. Thorold Rogers’s Six Centuries of Work and Wages a striking example is given of the continued rise of wages after the Black Death of 1349, despite all efforts of Parliament to fix them. “It is certain that the immediate consequence of the plague was a dearth of labor, an excessive enhancement of wages, and a serious difficulty in collecting the harvests of those landowners who depended on a supply of hired labor for the purpose of getting in their crops.... The plague, in short, had almost emancipated the surviving serfs.