WHY STATESMEN SHIRK THE MARRIAGE QUESTION

The reform of marriage, then, will be a very splendid and very hazardous adventure for the Prime Minister who takes it in hand.  He will be posted on every hoarding and denounced in every Opposition paper, especially in the sporting papers, as the destroyer of the home, the family, of decency, of morality, of chastity and what not.  All the commonplaces of the modern anti-Socialist Noodle’s Oration will be hurled at him.  And he will have to proceed without the slightest concession to it, giving the noodles nothing but their due in the assurance “I know how to attain our ends better than you,” and staking his political life on the conviction carried by that assurance, which conviction will depend a good deal on the certainty with which it is made, which again can be attained only by studying the facts of marriage and understanding the needs of the nation.  And, after all, he will find that the pious commonplaces on which he and the electorate are agreed conceal an utter difference in the real ends in view:  his being public, far-sighted, and impersonal, and those of multitudes of the electorate narrow, personal, jealous, and corrupt.  Under such circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that the mere mention of the marriage question makes a British Cabinet shiver with apprehension and hastily pass on to safer business.  Nevertheless the reform of marriage cannot be put off for ever.  When its hour comes, what are the points the Cabinet will have to take up?

THE QUESTION OF POPULATION

First, it will have to make up its mind as to how many people we want in the country.  If we want less than at present, we must ascertain how many less; and if we allow the reduction to be made by the continued operation of the present sterilization of marriage, we must settle how the process is to be stopped when it has gone far enough.  But if we desire to maintain the population at its present figure, or to increase it, we must take immediate steps to induce people of moderate means to marry earlier and to have more children.  There is less urgency in the case of the very poor and the very rich.  They breed recklessly:  the rich because they can afford it, and the poor because they cannot afford the precautions by which the artisans and the middle classes avoid big families.  Nevertheless the population declines, because the high birth rate of the very poor is counterbalanced by a huge infantile-mortality in the slums, whilst the very rich are also the very few, and are becoming sterilized by the spreading revolt of their women against excessive childbearing—­sometimes against any childbearing.