The State may not be able to afford this. The necessities of existence may be so difficult to obtain, not to mention for a moment such luxuries as alcohol and motor-cars and warships and fine clothes and art, and so forth, that no arrangements for the support of motherhood can be made. If we lay down the proposition that no mother should work because she is already doing the supreme work, it may be replied that this is economically impossible; the thing cannot be done. The only reply to this is that the State which cannot afford to provide rightly for the means of its continuance had better discontinue, and must in any case soon do so. Motherhood is rapidly declining as a numerical fact in civilized communities generally. Not merely does the birth-rate fall persistently and without the slightest regard to the commentators thereon, but it will continue to do so for many years to come. In the light of this fact the great argument of presidents and bishops, politicians and journalists, moralists and social censors generally is that somehow or other this decline must be arrested. To all of which one replies, for the thousand and first time, that, whatever it ought to be, it will not be arrested; that the really moral policy, the really human one, and the only possible one, is to take care of the children that are born. Then when we have abolished our infant and child mortality and have solved the substantial problem of finding room for all new-comers, having ceased to far more than decimate them, we may begin cautiously to suggest that perhaps if the birth-rate were slightly to rise we might be able to cope with the product. At present the disgraceful fact is not the birth-rate, but what we do with the birth-rate; though more disgraceful perhaps are the blindness and ignorance and assurance of the host of commentators in high places who waste their time and ours in animadverting upon a fact--the falling birth-rate--which is a necessary condition and consequence of organic progress, whilst the motherhood we have is so urgently in need of protection and idealization in the minds of the people.