Page:Women Wanted.djvu/372

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336
WOMEN WANTED

in a Usine de Guerre! After the schools for mothers and the maternity clinics have done what they may to reduce infant mortality, the mothers in industry may do some more. Take your babies in your arms, Mrs. Smith, and flee from that stalking spectre of poverty that has already snatched four of them to the grave. The door of the municipal crèche stands ajar!

Like this, the world is making ready for reconstruction. Let there be every first aid for the maker of men. We await one more measure: Mrs. Smith must never again have ten babies when she lives in two rooms—nor Frau Schmidt in Berlin. This unlimited increase that crowds children from the cradle to the coffin, in the haste to make room for more, has been the fatal force that has impelled nations teeming with too many people to make war for territorial expansion. We shall not blot out from civilisation the Prussian military ideal until we have likewise effaced the Prussian maternity ideal of reckless reproduction. That the cradles of the world may never again spill over, the nations must rise from the peace table with a new population policy. In the "birth politics" of the future there must be birth control. When children are scarce, are they dear. See France! The rising value of baby may yet lift the curse of Eve!

Then shall we be ready to repopulate right. After the battles are won and man's work of conquest is done, woman's war work will only have begun. I have stood in the cathedral at Rheims