Fire and electricity and other useful forces we have long since obtained the mastery over and turned from a menace to a blessing to mankind. But another even mightier force has ravaged the world like unchained lightning. Because it has not been controlled. Men thought that it must not be. So the fear of its consequences has haunted homes in every land since the pronouncement, “I will greatly multiply thy conceptions.” All of the great religious teachers said that you must not take the misery out of maternity. It was meant to be there. And science, which had accomplished miracles in mitigating other suffering, stood afar off from the woman in childbirth. So much as an anæsthetic to deaden the pain was forbidden, until quite recent times, as an interference with the will of the Almighty. It was Queen Elizabeth of England who broke that taboo. By virtue of her royal authority, she demanded chloroform. And got it. Her daring could then, of course, be followed by other women. Newer iconoclasts are calling for twilight sleep, that achieves maternity in a dream. Add birth control. And we shall be out of the trouble in which the unhappy lady called Eve so long ago involved all of her daughters. Birth control means, instead of a maternity that is perpetual, unregulated and haphazard and miserable, a maternity that is intelligently directed and limited. So that it shall be volitional. The rising value of a baby at last requires that people shall be as carefully produced as the shells we are making with such infinite accuracy. Most of all, it is important that there shall not be too many babies lest some of them not well done shall be only worthless and good for nothing. You see, you have to think about quality as well as quantity when you are counting for a final output. Russia, which had a birth rate of 50 per thousand, the highest birth rate in Europe, is the nation whose military defences have crumpled like paper. It was France, with a birth rate of 28 per thousand, the lowest in Europe, that held the line for civilisation at the Marne. And it was Germany, which has always imposed on its women as a national service the speeding up of population, that plunged the world into the agony of this war. Because 55% of the families of Berlin live in one-room tenements and there is nowhere to put the babies that have kept on coming, Germany reached out for the territory of her neighbours. The pressure of population too large for too narrow boundaries is as certain in its consequences as is the pressure of steam in a tea kettle with the spout stopped up. There’s sure to be an explosion. Germany exploded. Back of her military system, it is her maternity system that is responsible for the woe of the world to-day. It’s plain that the way not to have war anywhere ever again is not to have too many babies!