The whole of the present system is riddled with discontents. One factor is the enhanced sense of the child in middle-class life: the old sentiment was that the parent owned the child, the new is that the children own the parents. There has come an intensified respect for children, an immense increase in the trouble, attention and expenditure devoted to them—and a very natural and human accompaniment in the huge fall in the middle-class birth-rate. It is felt that to bear and rear children is the most noble and splendid and responsible thing in life, and an increasing number of people modestly evade it. People see more clearly the social service of parentage,
nuggets of gold on their persons; no one had lived to return to the spot where he found them.
"The remedy was severe, but does not appear to have been effectual," said I.
I may as well confess at once that they were rather disappointing. In detective novels clues abound, but here I could find nothing that struck me as out