It is with the greatest surprise that I see in Lucifer, of March 26, E. C. Walker, whom we have long been in the habit of regarding as a first-rate Anarchist, one who had probed to the bottom the cause of the present unjust distribution of wealth, propose Malthusianism as a measure in any way calculated to relieve the distress of the laboring masses. Can Mr. Walker really be so ignorant of the iron law of wages that he does not see that the reduction in number of the members of a family, the very moment it becomes general, can have no other result than a reduction of wages? Small families under present conditions are of advantage to men only as long as they are confined to a few.

Mr. Walker says that, when the laboring masses shall for two generations have had the practical sense to limit their offspring to two to each family, the great robberies of which our reformers complain will no longer be possible. I think that the verdict of history is against Mr. Walker. France has had small families for now nearly three generations, and the working-people are there no better off, no nearer to a solution to the social problem, than they are in any country in which large families prevail. The strikes at Lyons, Montceau-les-Mines, Decazeville, the statistics of wages and of the mode of living of French working-men and women, published not long since by M. d'Haussonville and Mme. de Baran in Revue des Deux Mondes, the fact 346,000 houses in the agricultural districts of France have no other opening than the door, while 1,817,535 have only a single window, do not speak very much in favor of small families as a remedy for the social disease. The only effect decrease in the size of families could have under present conditions would be to increase the proportion of the products of the laborer absorbed by the capitalist. It is only when a man is guaranteed the full product of his labor that thrift, a small family, etc., are matters of concern to him. Why, even John Stuart Mill admitted that the large families of the Irish were the result, not the cause, of their poverty; for there was no incentive to have fewer children, as misery was their lot in any case.

It must not be argued from this that we are opposed to small families, but what we do maintain is that small families are of no advantage to the people until after the industrial revolution is accomplished; and, when that is accomplished, the small families will come as a natural consequence. Emancipated woman will no longer consent to be a mere reproductive machine.

Gertrude B. Kelly