Down the street is the way out to the new home that Mrs. Smith’s wage envelope will help to build. There will be at least 4 rooms and the children away during the day under expert care. The little children of the rich in the West End nursery have no more scientific supervision than the municipal _crèche_ will afford Mrs. Smith for hers. I know she will not longer personally wash their faces and wipe their noses. Even when she tries to, as you may have noticed in any land, she cannot possibly do those tasks as often as they should be done. The mere physical needs of children, any one else can attend to. But only a mother can love them. Hadn’t we better conserve her more for that special function? The rising value of a baby begins to demand it. And don’t worry about the effect of factory employment on her health. Two government commissions of experts, one in France and one in England, tell us it’s all right after all. Both report that a properly arranged factory is as good a place as any for a woman. Some significant figures presented to England’s Birth Rate Commission show that the proportion of miscarriages is among factory workers 9.2 per cent. as compared with 16 per cent. among women doing housework in the home. Hard work and heavy work, you see, are just as harmful in Mrs. Smith’s kitchen as they might be anywhere else—and not nearly so well paid! Really, in spite of its historic setting there is no sacred significance attaching to the figure of a woman bending over a washtub or on her knees scrubbing a floor. Let us venerate instead Azalie de Rigeaux nursing her child in a Usine de Guerre! After the schools for mothers and the maternity clinics have done what they may to reduce infant mortality, the mothers in industry may do some more. Take your babies in your arms, Mrs. Smith, and flee from that stalking spectre of poverty that has already snatched four of them to the grave. The door of the municipal _crèche_ stands ajar! Like this, the world is making ready for reconstruction. Let there be every first aid for the maker of men. We await one more measure: Mrs. Smith must never again have ten babies when she lives in two rooms—nor Frau Schmidt in Berlin. This unlimited increase that crowds children from the cradle to the coffin, in the haste to make room for more, has been the fatal force that has impelled nations teeming with too many people to make war for territorial expansion. We shall not blot out from civilisation the Prussian military ideal until we have likewise effaced the Prussian maternity ideal of reckless reproduction. That the cradles of the world may never again spill over, the nations must rise from the peace table with a new population policy. In the “birth politics” of the future there must be birth control. When children are scarce, are they dear. See France! The rising value of a baby may yet lift the curse of Eve!