These letters give the skeletons of individuals’ lives, and individual thoughts and feelings; but in those facts and thoughts and feelings one can see clearly the general mould of life and the sweep of the current of general opinion which is among the working classes, resulting in the refusal to have children. There is a kind of strike against large families, and it is not, among the workers, a selfish strike. The motives of this strike are admirably given in the following words from Letter No. 71, the whole of which is very illuminating on this point: “All the beautiful in motherhood is very nice if one has plenty to bring up a family on, but what real mother is going to bring a life into the world to be pushed into the drudgery of the world at the earliest possible moment?...” The fact that the decline in the birth-rate is greatest among the better-paid wage-earners is often said to prove that a growing love of ease and luxury is causing a declining birth-rate. The words “ease and luxury” are grotesque when applied to the lives of manual wage-earners. The fact is that the industrial worker took the first seventy years of last century to learn that the conditions such as described in these letters make a human and a humane life impossible alike for the mother and children of large families. This consciousness has spread slowly and surely during the last forty years, and, as is natural, it has spread most amongst the more educated and intelligent workers and those whose wages have given them at least the opportunity of realising that there are other things in life besides poverty and work. The numbers of such men and women will continue to grow who refuse to have children except under two conditions. Those conditions are that society shall pay its debt to the manual worker in such a way that his children can be born into a home where there is something better than bare existence, and that the woman has the means and the leisure to live a life of her own without which she is unfit to give life to her children and to direct it during their most impressionable years.
It is impossible to leave this question without touching upon one point which crops up occasionally in these letters. Opinions may differ as to the good or evil of the general limitation of families, but there can only be agreement upon the evil which results from the use of drugs to procure abortion. There are many facts which go to prove that the habit of taking such drugs has spread to an alarming extent in many places among working women. Several of these letters confirm that conclusion. The practice is ruinous to the health of women, is more often than not useless for procuring the object desired, and probably accounts for the fact that many children are weakly and diseased from birth. But here again the cause of the evil lies in the conditions which produce it. Where maternity is only followed by an addition to the daily life of suffering, want, overwork, and poverty, people will continue to adopt even the most dangerous, uncertain, and disastrous methods of avoiding it.