The question may well be debated whether or not an average man in ordinary economic general conditions should be unable to care for more than three children below the earning period if his wife is a competent housemother and thus earns her part.

If such a condition of restriction upon family increase is accepted as inevitable and permanent in our industrial order, then surely the cost of rearing children must be far more widely distributed.

In such a condition there would be needed social help for fathers and mothers far more definite and inclusive than merely the aid to expectant mothers.

If it is true that it takes from three and one-half to four children from each married pair to keep up the population considered necessary for national well-being, and if there is an increasing number of men and women deterred from furnishing even two of that quota by the expense involved, then it is high time that we consider at least how the family burden may be more equally distributed.
=The French Plan of Family Extra-wage.=--One plan of meeting this unequal social burden of parenthood and the social danger involved in too few children born, France has devised by the family extra-wage.[8] This is simply a provision by which married workers with children are preferred before married workers without children, and much preferred before bachelors, in the matter of wages.

French work-people with families, irrespective of their station, rate of pay, premium or bonus, receive: 1.