That population, swelled by
overbreeding, is a basic cause of war, we shall see in a later chapter.
Without the large family, not one of these evils could exist to any
considerable extent, much less to the extent that they exist to-day. The
large family--especially the family too large to receive adequate care--is
the one thing necessary to the perpetuation of these and other evils and
is therefore a greater evil than any one of them.
First of the manifold immoralities involved in the producing of a
large family is the outrage upon the womanhood of the mother. If no
mother bore children against her will or against her feminine
instinct, there would be few large families. The average mother of a
baby every year or two has been forced into unwilling motherhood, so
far as the later arrivals are concerned. It is not the less immoral
when the power which compels enslavement is the church, state or the
propaganda of well-meaning patriots clamoring against "race suicide."
The wrong is as great as if the enslaving force were the unbridled
passions of her husband. The wrong to the unwilling mother, deprived
of her liberty, and all opportunity of self-development, is in itself
enough to condemn large families as immoral.
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