On the other hand, the program is an indication of a suddenly awakened public recognition of the shocking conditions surrounding pregnancy, maternity, and infant welfare prevailing at the very heart of our boasted civilization.  So terrible, so unbelievable, are these conditions of child-bearing, degraded far below the level of primitive and barbarian tribes, nay, even below the plane of brutes, that many high-minded people, confronted with such revolting and disgraceful facts, lost that calmness of vision and impartiality of judgment so necessary in any serious consideration of this vital problem.  Their “hearts” are touched; they become hysterical; they demand immediate action; and enthusiastically and generously they support the first superficial program that is advanced.  Immediate action may sometimes be worse than no action at all.  The “warm heart” needs the balance of the cool head.  Much harm has been done in the world by those too-good-hearted folk who have always demanded that “something be done at once.”

They do not stop to consider that the very first thing to be done is to subject the whole situation to the deepest and most rigorous thinking.  As the late Walter Bagehot wrote in a significant but too often forgotten passage: 

“The most melancholy of human reflections, perhaps, is that on the whole it is a question whether the benevolence of mankind does more good or harm.  Great good, no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil.  It augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it is open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this is entirely because excellent people fancy they can do much by rapid action, and that they will most benefit the world when they most relieve their own feelings; that as soon as an evil is seen, `something’ ought to be done to stay and prevent it.  One may incline to hope that the balance of good over evil is in favor of benevolence; one can hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain that there is a most heavy debt of evil, and that this burden might almost all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others had not inherited form their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for instant action.”

It is customary, I believe, to defend philanthropy and charity upon the basis of the sanctity of human life.  Yet recent events in the world reveal a curious contradiction in this respect.  Human life is held sacred, as a general Christian principle, until war is declared, when humanity indulges in a universal debauch of bloodshed and barbarism, inventing poison gases and every type of diabolic suggestion to facilitate killing and starvation.  Blockades are enforced to weaken and starve civilian populations—­women and children.  This accomplished, the pendulum of mob passion swings back to the opposite extreme, and the compensatory emotions express themselves in hysterical fashion.  Philanthropy and charity are then unleashed.  We begin to hold human life sacred again.  We try to save the lives of the people we formerly sought to weaken by devastation, disease and starvation.  We indulge in “drives,” in campaigns of relief, in a general orgy of international charity.