This desire to rise, and this dread too of incurring a responsibility that will assuredly check individual progress were counselled by Malthus, and resulted, and he said should result, in delayed marriage, lest a man, in taking to himself a wife, take also to himself a family he is unable to support.

But if this man can take to himself a wife without taking to himself a family, what then?

Men and women, in this Colony at least, have discovered that conformity to physiological law makes this possible.

A wife does not really add very much to a man’s responsibility—­it is the family that adds to his expense, and taxes all his resources.  It is the doctor and the nurse, the food and the clothing, and the education of the uninvited ones to his home, that use up all his earnings, that keep him poor, or make him poorer.

Then there is one aspect of the question peculiar to the women themselves.  Women have come to dread maternity.  This is part of a general impatience with pain common to us all.  Chloroform, and morphia, and cocaine, and ethyl chloride have taught us that pain is an evil.

When there was no chance of relieving it, we anaesthetised ourselves and each other with the thought that it was necessary, it was the will of Providence, the cry of our nerves for succour.

Now it is an evil, and if we must submit we do so under protest.  Women now engage doctors on condition that chloroform will be administered as soon as they scream, and they scream earlier in their labour at each succeeding occasion.

Women are less than ever impressed with the sacredness and nobility of maternity, and look upon it more and more as a period of martyrdom.  This attitude is in consonance with the crave for ease and luxury that is beginning to possess us.

It is, however, no new phase in human experience.  It characterised all the civilisations of ancient times, at the height of their prosperity, and was really the beginning of their decay.

Women with us are more eager to limit families than are their husbands.  They feel the burdens of a large family more.  They are often heard to declare that, with a large family around her, and limited funds at her disposal with which to provide assistance, a woman is a slave.  A large number think this, and, if there is a way out of the difficulty, they will follow that way.  And they are not content to escape the hardships of life.  They want comforts, and seek them earnestly.  With the advent of comfort, they seek for ease, and, when this is found, they seek for luxury and social position.

Parents with us have a high ideal of what upbringing should be.  Every parent wants his children to “do better” than himself.  If he does not wish to make a stepping-stone of them, on which to rise to higher social things, he certainly wishes to give them such a “start in life” as will give them the best prospects of keeping pace with, or outstripping their fellows.