RACE EXTINCTION.

Taranaki Daily News, 20 December 1917, Page 6

RACE EXTINCTION.

LECTURE BY DR. ALLEN. During "Baby Week" in Dunedin Dr. Allen delivered an address on "Race Extinction" of which the following is an abbreviated report.

Dr, Allen, in a few words, exposed the secret canker that is eating away the vitality of most civilised races.' Re said that the Prime Minister of New Zealand was not as important as a mother with three children. Until the last three years it had become increasingly evident that women did not want to have families, the reason being that they did not realise their own importance. But the war had wakened us\ll up to the fact that the only asset of any race was its people. Did his auditors know that in the whole wide Britisli Empire there were not as many white people as there were in the confines of Germany. What a disgrace! In these days the woman who stayed at home and bore and brought up her babies was the true patriot.

When a birth rate tell below <ii per thousand, a race was doomed, and only two countries in the civilised world had a birthrate over that figure. These countries were Russia and Japan. An Australian writer, 10 years ago, in a work, '-'Racial Decay," penned the following searching and terrible truths:— In Germany we see that as yet the is no bigger than a man's* hand." Over the United Kingdom it advances with stealthy and blighting progression, claiming every year something more for the blackness of annihilation. Over New South Wales and Victoria, over Queensland and South Australia, it came later but with much more rapid rush. New Zealand presents the most remarkable phenomenon of all. The colonists themselves are apparntly fully uwar of their own racial decadence, and are supremely unconcerned. The reduction of child life' is voluntary and deliberate. Writers have pointed to the fact that New Zealand enjoys all the political reforms claimed by the Socialist politician as essential to progress. New Zealand suffices as the living (or dying) example which destroys such illusions. Self-government adult suffrage, women's rights, eoileotivist trading, universal comfort, absence of militarism, old age pensions. workmen's insurance, equalising (if not equality) of sacrifice, no national defence, and uninterrupted peace for a generation—these and other advantages did not save the Britisli colony from its plunge towards national suicide.

In this country, Dr. Allen resumed we should take off our hats to the Catholic community, for it at least had not fallen behind in this matter. The rather dreadful facts he had read were written ten years ago. The war had brought their importance sharply home. The destiny of the race was in the hands of those he saw before him—in the hands of the women—and he was sure that, since the women of New Zealand now realised the urgent necessitv for population, they would respond to its urgency. That was the trumpet call for tiie young women of the Dominion In the next few years the children and mothers would receive more protection. Political reform must take that direction. "You women are the people who will give us population," concluded Dr. Allen, "and therefore 'you are the people,' and tiie State must treat you as such,"