Thus is explained quite simply over the world to-day the rising value of a baby. Civilisation is running short in the supply of men. We don’t know exactly how short. There are the Red Cross returns that say in the first six months alone of the war there were 2,146,000 men killed in battle and 1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures, however, of cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There is a living figure that may not be. See the woman in black all over Europe and to-morrow we shall meet her in Broadway. There are so many of her in every belligerent land over there that her crêpe veil flutters across her country’s flag like the smoke that dims the landscape in a factory town. It is the mourning emblem of her grief unmistakably symbolising the dark catastrophe of civilisation that has signalled Parliaments to assemble in important session. Population is being killed off at such an appalling rate at the front that the means for replacing it behind the lines must be speeded up without delay. To-day registrar generals in every land in white-faced panic are scanning the figures of the birth rates that continue to show steadily diminishing returns. And in every house of government in the world, above all the debates on aeroplanes and submarines and shipping and shells, there is the rising alarm of another demand. Fill the cradles! In the defence of the state men bear arms. It is women who must bear the armies. Whole battalions of babies have been called for. If we in America have had no requisitions as yet, it is because we have not yet begun to count our casualty costs. L’Alliance Nationale pour L’Accroissement de la Population Française is calling on the French mothers for at least four children apiece during the next decade. Britain’s Birth Rate Commission wants a million new babies from Scotland alone. The Gesellschaft fur Bevolkerungs Politik, which is the society for increase of population organised at a great meeting in the Prussian Diet House, has entered its order with the German women for a million more babies annually for the next ten years. And that is the “birth politics” of men. Then to the proposals of savants and scientists, sociologists and statesmen, military men and clergymen and kings, there has been entered a demurrer. Governments may propose, Increase and multiply. She-who-shall-dispose overlays their falling birth rate figures with the rising death rate statistics. And there is tragedy in her eyes: “What,” she asks, “have you done with my children? The babies that I have given you, you have wasted them so!”