Hankins: The Declining Birth Rate 



365 



Here is Spencer's principle of the ten- 

 dency of progress to magnify and exalt 

 the individual personality; here also is 

 his principle that social advance is 

 accompanied by a decreasing sacrifice of 

 parents to racial demands. 



Now this of course has its good and its 

 bad features. There may be individual 

 ambition which takes the direction of 

 pure sordidness — the excessive selfish- 

 ness of the woman who will not surrender 

 a part of her inconsequential and 

 socially valueless card playing and 

 dancing or of the man who doesn't want 

 to share any of his income or his prop- 

 erty and the freedom they give him. 

 Now it is equally true that neither 

 matrimonial concubinage nor brutal, 

 soul-destroying selfishness are socially 

 justifiable. Individual ambition may 

 on the other hand take the direction of 

 social achievement. It is undoubtedly 

 true that children are an impediment to 

 the man or woman who would win fame 

 in business, science, literature or art. 

 But here what society loses in talented 

 offspring is in part counterbalanced by 

 greater present achievement. Indi- 

 vidual ambition may and now frequently 

 does take the direction of a desire for the 

 better training and equipment of children 

 for the duties of life. When, however, 

 the combination of ambition for the 

 child and selfishness and fear on the part 

 of the parents results in the one-child 

 family, it often happens that the child 

 has lost more by the absence of brother 

 or sister than he has gained by the in- 

 creased chance of a good start in life. 



PROPER SIZE OF FAMILY. 



There is, I believe, nothing that 

 promises more for the solution of 

 problems of poverty, low wages, eco- 

 nomic inequality and kindred social prob- 

 lems than the fact that parents are 

 acquiring the power to determine in 

 each case what their family should be, 

 but there must be a golden mean be- 

 tween none and a dozen which represents 

 the socially desirable. If three or four 

 children for each fruitful marriage are 

 necessary to maintain the population in 

 a stationary state, then three, four, or 

 five children must represent the family 

 which society would profit by standard- 

 izing. While individuals of great genius 



may here and there profit by complete 

 freedom from early struggles, it never- 

 theless remains true sociologically that 

 a race which is to remain strong and 

 progressive must develop in its youth 

 a sense of self-reliance and a willingness 

 to undergo hardships which cannot come 

 when all needs from childhood to man- 

 hood are provided by the paternal 

 pocketbook. 



It is extremely difficult in practice to 

 get the wisest proportioning of size of 

 family and economic resources. A 

 truly democratic system would require 

 many children of the rich and few of the 

 poor; this would quickly destroy class 

 divisions. The rich, the well-to-do, the 

 professional classes maintain their 

 supremacy in the social system partly 

 because their numbers are small and 

 unskilled laborers do the meanest work 

 at the lowest wages because their 

 numbers are large. But a more ideal 

 social arrangement will be that in which 

 the number of children is so related to 

 the economic status of the family that 

 individual ambition will not be killed by 

 the enervating effects of luxury on the 

 one hand or the demoralizing effects of 

 poverty on the other. Such an arrange- 

 ment would permit most rather than the 

 favored few to share the fruits of civiliza- 

 tion, woiild so enlarge the opportunities 

 of the lower classes that society would 

 get the benefit of much talent at present 

 smothered by the grime and toil of 

 economic insecurity. 



There are those conspicuous in the 

 councils of the nation who urge upon all 

 the public duty and the personal joys of 

 large families. But there is reason to 

 suppose that the unfit are now multi- 

 plying more rapidly than the fit. And 

 in the second place the chief fault with 

 modern society is that it has too mam^ 

 poor, too many at the bottom already. 

 What we ought to work toward as a 

 public policy is the reduction of the 

 great mass of unskilled labor and the 

 consequent equalization of economic 

 opportunities. Of course there are dif- 

 erent ideals of what society ought to 

 be. Some prefer great masses of people, 

 large volumes of imports and exports, 

 great armies and the pomp and noise of 

 a world power; and they prefer these 

 things even though they be purchased 



