product.”  It would be impracticable, and even undesirable, to insist that married women should not be allowed to work, for a work in the world is good for all.  It is estimated that over thirty per cent. of the women workers in England are married or widows (James Haslam, Englishwoman, June, 1909), and in Lancashire factories alone, in 1901, there were 120,000 married women employed.  But it would be easily possible for the State to arrange, in its own interests, that a woman’s work at a trade should always give way to her work as a mother.  It is the more undesirable that married women should be prohibited from working at a profession, since there are some professions for which a married woman, or, rather, a mother, is better equipped than an unmarried woman.  This is notably the case as regards teaching, and it would be a good policy to allow married women teachers special privileges in the shape of increased free time and leave of absence.  While in many fields of knowledge an unmarried woman may be a most excellent teacher, it is highly undesirable that children, and especially girls, should be brought exclusively under the educational influence of unmarried teachers.

The second great channel through which the impulse towards the control of procreation for the elevation of the race is entering into practical life is by the general adoption, by the educated classes of all countries—­and it must be remembered that, in this matter at all events, all classes are gradually beginning to become educated—­of methods for the prevention of conception except when conception is deliberately desired.  It is no longer permissible to discuss the validity of this control, for it is an accomplished fact and has become a part of our modern morality.  “If a course of conduct is habitually and deliberately pursued by vast multitudes of otherwise well-conducted people, forming probably a majority of the whole educated class of the nation,” as Sidney Webb rightly puts it, “we must assume that it does not conflict with their actual code of morality."[428]

There cannot be any doubt that, so far as England is concerned, the prevention of conception is practiced, from prudential or other motives, by the vast majority of the educated classes.  This fact is well within the knowledge of all who are intimately acquainted with the facts of English family life.  Thus, Dr. A.W.  Thomas writes (British Medical Journal, Oct. 20, 1906, p. 1066):  “From my experience as a general practitioner, I have no hesitation in saying that ninety per cent. of young married couples of the comfortably-off classes use preventives.”  As a matter of fact, this rough estimate appears to be rather under than over the mark.  In the very able paper already quoted, in which Sidney Webb shows that “the decline in the birthrate appears to be much greater in those sections of the population which give proofs of thrift and foresight,” that this decline is “principally,