In other words, the modern State has got to pay for its children if it really wants them—­and more particularly it has to pay for the children of good homes.

The alternative to that is racial replacement and social decay.  That is the essential idea conveyed by this phrase, the Endowment of Motherhood.

Now, how is the paying to be done?  That needs a more elaborate answer, of which I will give here only the roughest, crudest suggestion.

Probably it would be found best that the payment should be made to the mother, as the administrator of the family budget, that its amount should be made dependent upon the quality of the home in which the children are being reared, upon their health and physical development, and upon their educational success.  Be it remembered, we do not want any children; we want good-quality children.  The amount to be paid, I would particularly point out, should vary with the standing of the home.  People of that excellent class which spends over a hundred a year on each child ought to get about that much from the State, and people of the class which spends five shillings a week per head on them would get about that, and so on.  And if these payments were met by a special income tax there would be no social injustice whatever in such an unequality of payment.  Each social stratum would pay according to its prosperity, and the only redistribution that would in effect occur would be that the childless people of each class would pay for the children of that class.  The childless family and the small family would pay equally with the large family, incomes being equal, but they would receive in proportions varying with the health and general quality of their children.  That, I think, gives the broad principles upon which the payments would be made.

Of course, if these subsidies resulted in too rapid a rise in the birth-rate, it would be practicable to diminish the inducement; and if, on the other hand, the birth-rate still fell, it would be easy to increase the inducement until it sufficed.

That concisely is the idea of the Endowment of Motherhood.  I believe firmly that some such arrangement is absolutely necessary to the continuous development of the modern State.  These proposals arise so obviously out of the needs of our time that I cannot understand any really intelligent opposition to them.  I can, however, understand a partial and silly application of them.  It is most important that our good-class families should be endowed, but the whole tendency of the timid and disingenuous progressivism of our time, which is all mixed up with ideas of charity and aggressive benevolence to the poor, would be to apply this—­as that Fabian tract I mention does—­only to the poor mother.  To endow poor and bad-class motherhood and leave other people severely alone would be a proceeding so supremely idiotic, so harmful to our national quality, as to be highly probable in the present state of our public intelligence.  It comes quite on a level with the policy of starving middle-class education that has left us with nearly the worst educated middle class in Western Europe.