Stand Up, Ye Dead. Norman Maclean

CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      THE EMPTY CRADLE

      The greatest disaster of these days has befallen in the streets and lanes of our cities at home, and, because it has happened in our own midst, we are blind to it. And, also, it has come upon us so gradually and so surreptitiously that, though we are overwhelmed by it, we know not that we are overwhelmed. Our capital cities are leading the nation in the march to the graveyard. In London the birthrate has fallen in Hampstead from 30 to 17.55, and in the City itself to 17.4; in Edinburgh it has fallen in some districts to 10. In many places there are already more coffins than cradles. What would the city of Edinburgh say or do if suddenly one half of its children were slain in a night? What a cry of horror would rise to heaven! Yet, that is exactly the calamity which has overtaken the city. In the year 1871 there were 34 children born in Edinburgh for every thousand of the population; in the year 1915 the number of births per thousand of the population was 17. Edinburgh has, compared to forty-four years ago, sacrificed half its children. And because this calamity is the slowly ripening fruit of forty years, and did not occur with dramatic swiftness in a night, there is no sound of lamentation in the streets.

      I

What has happened in London and Edinburgh is only what has happened over all the British Empire, with this difference—that these cities are leading the van in the process of desiccating the fountain of the national life. While the birthrate for the whole of Scotland is 23.9, that of Edinburgh is 17.8. For the nation as a whole the policy of racial suicide has become a national policy. The marriage-rate increases, but the birth-rate decreases. A birthrate of 35.6 per thousand in 1874 decreased to 33.7 in 1880, 32.9 in 1886, 30.4 in 1890, and to 23.8 in 1912. If the city of Edinburgh is sacrificing at the fountain-head half of its possible population, the rest of the English-speaking race is following hard in its wake. The facts which to-day confront us spell doom. In the year 1911 the legitimate births in England and Wales numbered 843,505, but if the birthrate had remained as it was in the years 1876–80, the number would have been 1,273,698. 'That is to say, there was a potential loss to the nation of 430,000 in that one year 1911.'[1] In the year 1914 the loss is even greater, for it amounted to 467,837. The nation as a whole is now sacrificing every year a third of its possible population. This is surely a terrible fact. The ravages of war, awful though these ravages have been, are nothing to the ravages which have been self-inflicted. In the years that are past, the race recovered from the greatest calamities of war and pestilence because there was a power mightier than these—that of the child. The abounding birthrate rapidly replaced the wastage of war. Through the greatest calamities the nation ever marched forward on the feet of little children. One generation might be overwhelmed, but

      'Away down the river,

       A hundred miles or more,

       Other little children

       Shall bring our boats ashore.'

      But alas! when the greatest of all calamities has overtaken the race; when the young, the noble, and the brave have lain down in death that the nation might live, the feet of the little children, on which erstwhile the race marched forward, are not there. We have offered them up a sacrifice to Moloch.

      II

      The nation must be wakened to the dire peril in which the steadily falling birthrate has placed the race. Militarism slays its thousands; this has strangled its hundreds of thousands. But no warning note has been sounded by our statesmen. They were doubtless waiting to see!

      The might of every nation depends on the reservoir of its vitality. Let that desiccate and the nation desiccates. Of this France is the proof. That France which, a hundred years ago, overran Europe, fifty years later lay prostrate under the feet of Germany. Twenty years before that national humiliation, France began to sacrifice her children. Lord Acton pointed out the inevitable result; the wise of their own number warned them—but France went on its way down the slope of moral degeneration. Its birthrate fell from 30.8 in 1821 to 26.2 in 1851, 25.4 in 1871, 22.1 in 1891, 20.6 in 1901, and to 19 in 1914. The result was inevitable. In the race of empire France fell slowly back. The alien had to be imported to cultivate her own fair fields. She annexed territories, but she could not colonise them. The prophets who prophesied doom have been abundantly justified. To-day France, risen from the dead, is wrestling for her life; she is impotent to drive back the foe without the help of Britain and Russia—she who dominated Europe a century ago! When we read of a Russian army, after a journey round half the world, landing at Marseilles to take their place in the trenches that Paris may be saved from the devastators of Belgium and Poland, we see the fields ripe for the harvest of that policy which sacrificed the race to the individual. The hope for France is that she will rise from the grave of her degeneration, new-born.

      What has happened in France is what happened in Rome long before. It was not because of the inrush of barbaric hosts that Rome perished, but because Rome sacrificed its children. In its golden age, when luxury clouded the heart, Rome began to avoid the responsibilities of family life, and so sounded the death-knell of its empire. Here is ever the source of human decay. The most perfect intellectual and æsthetic civilisation ever developed on earth was that of the ancient Greeks. 'We

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