In this matter the women who have to bear the children must be considered. It is possible for a woman to bear twenty children. In certain country districts in Europe families of fifteen are not uncommon enough to be regarded as extraordinary. But though a properly cared-for woman of vigorous constitution, with her confinements reasonably spaced out, can apparently stand this strain without permanent disablement or damage, and remain as well and strong as women who have borne no children at all, yet the bearing of each child involves a long period of discomfort and sickness, culminating in temporary disablement, severe pain, and a risk of death. The father escapes this; but at present he has to earn wages to support the children while they are growing; and though there may be plenty of employment for them when they come to working age, that does not provide any bread and butter for them in the meantime. Consequently an increase of population that benefits the country and the world may be an almost unbearable burden to the parents. They therefore restrict their families to the number the father can afford, or the mother cares to bear, except when they do not know how this can be done, or are forbidden by their religion to practise birth control. This has a very important bearing on the equal distribution of income. To understand this I must go back a little, and seem to change the subject; but the connexion will soon be plain. If the workers in all occupations are to receive the same income, how are we to deal with the fact that though the cost of living is the same for all workers, whether they are philosophers or farm hands, the cost of their work varies very greatly. A woman in the course of a day’s work may use up a reel of cotton costing a few pence whilst her husband, if a scientific worker, may require some radium, which costs £16,000 an ounce. The gunners on the battle-fields in Flanders, working at a dreadful risk of life and limb, needed very little money for themselves; but the cost of the materials they used up in a single day was prodigious. If they had had to pay on the nail, out of their wages, for the cannons they wore out and the shells they fired, there would have been no war. This inequality of expense cannot be got over by any sort of adjustment of leisure or holidays or privileges of any sort between worker and worker. Still less can it be met by unequal wages. Even the maddest upholder of our wage system will not propose that the man who works a steam hammer costing many thousands of pounds should have wages proportionately higher than the wages of the navvy who swings a sledgehammer or the woodcutter who wields a beetle costing shillings instead of thousands of pounds. The worker cannot bear the cost of his materials and implements if he is to have only an equal share of the national income: he must either be supplied with them, or repaid for them in the cases in which he has to supply them at his own cost.