No Indian with any claim to patriotism can read unmoved the Resolution of the Government of India on the inadequate and disappointing response to the invitation to the educated classes to join the Defense of India Force. The language of the Resolution is restrained and free from bitterness and that makes it all the more weighty. It is a state document which reflects credit on the Government but is wholly discreditable to ourselves. So far as professions went we were avid of every opportunity to prove that we are as good as any nation under the sun, and were willing to prove our mettle in any path of life. Among the standing and recurrent Resolutions of the Indian National Congress is a protest against the Arms Act and the regulations passed under it. The name of the late Sir Pherozshah Mehta has been mentioned among the leading opponents of this measure. It was at the Allahabad Congress of 1888 that Sir Pherozshah amidst thunderous applause denounced the Arms Act as a piece of legislation tending to emasculate a whole nation. Since then the Congress has reaffirmed the Resolution of protest year after year. It is undeniable that a nation disarmed is a nation unready, incapable of defending itself against an armed enemy.

There were other disqualifications and grievances. The army as a profession was closed to the educated

classes because of the inferior status of Indian officers. Besides, an arbitrary and humiliating distinction was made between what were called martial and non-martial races as if nature sets the final seal of fitness or unfitness upon any one people or race. While these disabilities remained, progress in other directions was rapid. Indian thought grew fast; the ideals of the West were quickly grasped and assimilated, and the cultured classes of India were filled with a natural and legitimate ambition of rising in the scale of nations. In our own opinion we are quite fit for SelfGovernment and to be placed on the same level as the Dominions Overseas. Our intellectual fitness has been proved and during the war we have given our blood freely to prove our physical fitness. Is not all that the greater reason why we should have responded with alacrity to the invitation to join the Defense of India Force? The men who fought in France, the Gallipolli Peninsula and Mesopotamia were not taken from the ranks of the educated classes. These latter have had a chance now, not actually of going to the fighting line but of being enlisted for a time to serve in the defense of their country.

How have they availed themselves of this chance? In six months 6,000 volunteers were wanted from all India. In two months only 300 applications have been received! The Resolution says: "The Governor

General-in-Council was anxious that the opportunity should be afforded to Indians also to enroll themselves in the Indian Defense Force. He was aware that there had for long been a desire that volunteering should be thrown open to Indian as well as European British subjects and was assured that if that opportunity could be afforded to them, a ready and enthusiastic response would be made.” The scheme put forward by the Government has been criticised on the public platform and in the press and the result has been as stated above. It means that unless the scheme is to our liking, unless the conditions are acceptable, unless we have our own officers we do not want to join the Defense of India Force, and in the event of danger the Government must do what they can to defend the country.

Is that what is meant by SelfGovernment? We are not prepared to undertake the elementary duty of defending our country against danger, but we want to rule it and to rule ourselves. Is that Government by the people and for the people? We are to have all the soft jobs, the patronage, the power to rule; the tough job of fighting for the country must be left to others. Baldly put that is how the matter looks. Our leaders realized what we had at stake when the scheme was announced. Mr. Tilak with characteristic outspokenness used the argumentum ad hominem. He threatened to give up Home Rule unless people volunteered for the Defense of India Force. The staid The Hindustan Review.

old Bombay Presidency Association issued an appeal. Mr. Surendranath Banerjea delivered eloquent speeches in Calcutta and elsewhere. In Madras Mrs. Besant opened a register of names. We do not know what was done in the other Provinces, but the net result is there for all to know. Three hundred applications in two months from Volunteers to defend the Motherland!

There are still some months left and we should put forward all our energy to get the number required. We the educated classes of India are on our trial. If we pass the ordeal we have a bright future before us; if we fail it will be an indelible disgrace and we shall deserve to be laughed at and mocked if we again raise a cry of Self-Government and Home Rule. No criticism, no hesitation will avail us. The 6,000 men must be found within the prescribed time for then only shall we be able to hold up our heads. We are only now beginning to realize that there is a world of difference between babblers and doers. We have done the talking pretty well so far, it is the doing that is baffling us. The pinch and the iron grip of sacrifice is very different from the easy-chair and cushioned dream of sacrifice. But this time there is no getting out of it. Let us, at the very least, learn to follow even at a great distance the example of those thousands of our uneducated countrymen who have died for their King and country in the far-off battle-fields of this world war, in the far-flung battle line which extends over two continents.

At last, as the result of the most disastrous war in history, the baby is recognized as a work of national

importance. Obviously we have made up our minds to turn the world into a place better worth being born into

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than it has hitherto been. It is hardly conceivable that we are inviting millions of new little Europeans into the world merely to pitch them into the ancient bloody battle between people and people and between rich and poor. Not that the world as it has been in the past is a place to decry. One could not endure to be a parent if one thought that. At the same time, there is no denying that the world in the past has been regulated with a view to protecting the greed of the old men rather than to protecting the happiness of babies. The human race does not easily admit the idea that the happiness of babies was quite as important a social end as the self-aggrandizement of its elders. The baby was among many peoples merely one of its father's possessions. could expose it with as much impunity as a modern householder drowning kittens. Nor was infanticide a custom practised only among savages. It was accepted almost without protest in the great days of Greece. Aristotle denounced the practice, regarding abortion as the better way of keeping down the population, but Plato in The Republic advocates the exposure of weakly children. Infanticide is, of course, merely the primitive method of limiting families. It is possible that, in countries where infanticide is common, the parent thinks no more of preventing a baby from continuing to live than people in civilized communities think of preventing a baby from being born. In both cases economic necessity-or at least economic convenience-presses, and for economic necessity men and women will do almost anything. At least, savages and comfortably-off people will. The poor in Christian countries alone seem to be able at a crisis to control their dread of a new mouth crying out to be fed. Many savage tribes strictly forbid any woman to bring up a large family.

On Radack Island the family was at one time not allowed to exceed three; any further children that were born had to be buried alive. The Line Islanders permit four children in a family. On one of the Ellice Islands, on the other hand, only two are allowed. It would be absurd to imagine, however, that the custom of slaughtering infants as nuisances is anything like universal in primitive. communities. It is, we fancy, the exception rather than the rule, and is usually due to the fear of famine, when it is not the result of religious superstition. An increase in female infanticide is said to have occurred in Japan as a result of the impoverishing taxation which was levied during the Russo-Japanese War. China, being a land of famine, has always also been a land of infanticide: one realizes how common the practice must have been when one hears of an ancient Chinese book entitled On Abstaining from Drowning Little Girls. That a parent's relations to his child were in the nature of rights rather than duties was recognized both by Roman emperors and Roman pontiffs. A father was allowed either to expose his child or to sell it. He was forbidden by Diocletian to sell his children, but, as he only slew them instead, the prohibition was removed. Even the Christian Church in the seventh century recognized the right of a father to sell his sons into slavery, provided they were not seven years old.

Facts like these seem to suggest that there is very little natural affection in parents for their children. But this does not seem to be the case. "Shans are all baby-lovers," say the authors of that charming book, Shans at Home, and we have plenty of evidence from Africa of the affection of negro parents for their children. The negro father does not show the same

devotion as the negro mother, but, even as regards him, "one may often see him caressing the babies and playing with them." There are certain Red Indian tribes which apparently glorify children much as Wordsworth in his pseudo-Platonic mood did. The Iroquois believe that "a child still continues to hold intercourse with the spirit world whence it so recently came," and they are said to refrain from corporal punishment on the ground that it would hurt the child's soul. A similar glorification of children prevails apparently among the Omaha Indians. Grown-up Omahas refrain from telling stories during the summer, on the ground that the snakes might hear and do mischief. The children, however, are as safe from the snakes as in one of Blake's poems: "They carry the songs out among the summer blossoms, and the snakes do them no harm." One has only to consider all the games and the stories which are played and told in savage communities to realize that even at a primitive stage man is not insensitive to the delightfulness of childhood. It may be urged that folk-stories are, after all, nothing but moral tales, and that their chief object is to frighten children rather than to amuse them. Frankly, we do not believe it. The human being is not such a utilitarian beast as he is pictured. He enjoys giving happiness as much as giving instruction. He gives jam with the powder, not merely to deceive the child into taking the powder, but because he knows the child likes jam. Uncle Remus, we may be sure, is an inheritance of delight which comes down from barbarous black mothers in the jungle to the pretty pale mothers of the civilized world without much essential change in the spirit. Common sense tells us that babies, when they are not squalling, must always be the most popular of pleasure givers. Hap

piness is infectious, and nothing in the world is quite so unreasonably happy as a baby that lies on its back, laughing and making guttural noises. A child playing with a spoon and beating the side of a cradle with ita child crowing as it looks up into the leaves of a tree and sees them stirring in the wind-this is something that wins a laugh in all the continents. It is the most universal of jests. So much is this so that it seems to us at times that it can hardly be called a virtue to be fond of children. One can imagine a fairly bad sort of criminal playing with children and enjoying it as one can imagine him caressing a cat or playing with a dog. And yet, in so far as he does these things, he does in a manner seem to justify human nature. To have a taste for such natural pleasures is nine-tenths of the virtue one needs.

People sometimes talk as if we had only begun to idealize children when we began, as it were, to run short of them. But this is nonsense. The idealization of children began in days when men still built houses as large as hotels, as though no happily married couple could be expected to have fewer than seven children. Swinburne did not wait till the birth-rate had fallen to sing-how like a drawingroom ballad!

A baby's feet, like sea-shells pink,

Might tempt, should heaven see meet An angel's lips to kiss, we think, A baby's feet.

The attitude of Maria Edgeworth and Mrs. Sherwood to children may strike people in these days as solemnly comic, but at least they thought children worth writing books for in days in which children were as common as seaweed. The difference between those days and these is that in those days children were idealized and beaten, whereas in these days

they are idealized and pampered. One would have imagined that every child in Europe would have been safe from cruelty as soon as it was known that Christ had said: "Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." But unhappily Christian Europe plunged into a theology which taught it not only that the child was a beautiful little angel but that it was also a miserable little sinner. The Christian God was for centuries a God who could send little children to hell, and they had to be saved from this extreme doom by whipping and hunger and darkness. It seems to us one of the strangest paradoxes in human nature that a Calvinist, believing that the chances of a human creature's being sent to hell preponderated over the chances of his being saved, none the less seems to have had no compunction in introducing children one after another into so doubtful a scene. But perhaps no man would dare to have a child if he thought of the dark side of the universe. It is at the same time rather curious that people who believe the world is reasonably good are more reluctant to bring children into it than were people who believed the world to be unreasonably bad. It may be explained by the fact that, in deciding whether to have children or not, most human beings have regard less to the children than to themselves.

One of the good circumstances which accompany the increased interest in children at the present time is the increased interest which is being shown in the mothers of children. However much the Victorian might desire children-and blessed was he who had his quiver full of them!-he none the less regarded the bearing of children as inferior work to going to The New Statesman.

an office. It was essentially drudge's work. Woman was looked down on rather than respected for devoting so much time to it. It was even considered a disqualification for the vote. This attitude had not died a few years ago, as was seen when, during the Militant Suffragist campaign, thousands of young men gathered in Hyde Park, many of them armed with little baby dolls, to howl down Suffragist speakers with cries of "Go home and mind the baby!" The baby, however, has now ceased to be a mere supernumerary, and with that the mother, too, ceases to be half an outlaw. Economic necessity is driving the European nations no longer to the destruction but to the multiplication of infants. This, however, has happened before without much apparent benefit to the infants. So great was the destruction of life during the Sicilian expedition that the Athenians legalized bigamy as a means of increasing the population. In the Roman empire, again, Augustus attempted by the Lex Julia et Papia to compel men and women not only to marry but to have families. Similar causes are, no doubt, at work in the modern world making for an increase of the numbers of children. But we fancy there is also an idealism at work now which was scarcely known in Greece and Rome. There is a desire abroad that the children shall have the best of everything, and that the modern form of infanticide called poverty and slumdwellings shall cease. It is hypocrisy in us to praise children and to hold national festivals in their honor if we do not intend to make the world a garden for them. There is no ideal possible for an honest man but to desire a world in which every child shall have the same chances of food and air and play and happiness as he would wish for a child of his own.