CRADLE AND GRAVE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 53, 28 June 1940, Page 24

CRADLE AND GRAVE

AFTER THE FIRST 100 YEARS. Report of the Birth Rate Committee of the New Zealand Five Million Club. Foreword by W. E. Barnard. 55 pp. 1/6d. : When anyone sets out to examine such a question as this he makes what is more or less a public inquiry into an

essentially private matter. That seems to have been the initial difficulty of the Five Million Club. They have had to tely on statistics limited in their effect because the Government Statistician faces similar limitations, and they have not had the opportunity to place in the field enough research experts to get all the personal information required. However, they contrive to make such information as they have found available do a very thorough job of work. They prove their case-that New Zealand’s population is on the decline: examine the reasons for it, assess the significance of it, ‘and suggest remedies. With all the handicaps, so freely admitted by the editors of this booklet, they still raise social questions of such vital importance that no one who reads their findings will put them by without feeling puzzled, if not thoroughly worried. They are not sure whether social fashions or economic necessity should be considered the most important factors contributing to the decline in the birth

rate. They believe that contraceptive methods: are now far more effective and far more _ readily available than they have ever been; and they believe they are being far more widely used. Whatever the reason, they see clearly enough

that New Zealand is running into a complicated social difficulty. They anticipate that the coming years will see far more middle-aged and elderly people than there are now, and they wonder just what this will mean: re-distribution of employment, a more reactionary spirit towards social legislation, incalculable burdens of old-age pensions falling on working-age-groups. When they reach remedies, the Five Million Club’s editorial committee come to a discussion, whether they realise it it or not, of the ability of man as an individual to interfere with the evolutionary trends of cycles of man as a unit in group. They suggest education as one method of forcing up the birth rate, although there is no evidence to show that people will have larger families simply because they are told it will be better for them. They suggest the control of the sale of contraceptives through proper clinics, but do not produce evidence to show that this would work any more efficiently than prohibition worked in America. They suggest that economic encouragement should be given to parents, and here they seem to be getting somewhere, although they admit themselves that social causes contribute more to the decline than economic causes, There are many virtues in this little publication. The greatest of these are the clarity with which it treats a subject not easily simplified and, more important, the frankness with which it admits that all is not known that might be known, It is this last feature which will leave readers with that stimulating sense of something still to be done. It is groping in the dark, like all social studies, with just enough dim light to make it worth while stretching the arm of research a little further.