If You Suffer from Then they joined and all abused it, Unrestrainedly abused it, As the worst, most monstrous measure Ever brought before the Commons.
Such, with due acknowledgments to Longfellow-cum-Lewis Carroll, may fairly describe the reception by the House of Commons recently of the Population (Statistics) Bill There are debates, as on the India Bill or the buying-out of the coal owners, in which the House grows distinctly savage. There are others in which the bludgeon of abuse is replaced by the rapier of wit. Such was this debate, and from the onlooker's point of view, there is no question but that the rapier is the more popular. Probably also more effective.
Like most European nations, we are, as you knew, much worried about the decline of population, Some Cassandras prophesy that 100 years hence, we shall only number 3,000,000. True that was all the population of England in good Queen Bess's golden da But the Elizabethans had not acquired our vast responsibilities; they had not accepted the duty of subscribing £450 millions a year for social services; and there was no doubt about their vitality, which in our case, according tə the Cassandras, is very much In doubt The Population (Statistics) Bill fathered by the Ministry of Health is designed, if not precisely'to check the decline, at any rate to ascertain where and how it is taking place, by compelling people when registering a birth or death to answer a number of more or less intimate questions. It is the weak part of the Bill that it does not specify what sort of questions. In vain the Minister of Health protested that they would not be offense Members were wholly unconvinced. They know what happens when bureaucrats begin asking questions. Somerset House, they said, was the real author of the Bill. It had long been hankering after something of the kind. It was a fair specimen of the ways of the official mind "which collects statistics children collect omnibus tickets" And how on earth, when the statistics had been col-re they going to increase the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.