Corelli, Marie: The Treasure of Heaven. V1. 15 Apr 2011
 

Marie Corelli (1 May 1855 – 21 April 1924) was a British novelist. She emerged as a literary superstar from the publication of her first novel in 1886 until World War I when her popularity began to fade. Corelli's novels sold more copies than the combined sales of popular contemporaries, including Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Rudyard Kipling, despite the fact that critics often derided her work as "the favorite of the common multitude."

Excerpt
"People talk foolishly of a 'declining birth-rate,'" he went on; "yet if, according to the modern scientist, all civilisations are only so much output of wasted human energy, doomed to pass into utter oblivion, and human beings only live but to die and there an end, of what avail is it to be born at all? Surely it is but wanton cruelty to take upon ourselves the responsibility of continuing a race whose only consummation is rottenness in unremembered graves!"