474 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



becomes more and more widespread, the economic factor produces not 

 only this unintentional diminution of births, but also a much larger 

 intentional prevention of children. Mr. Charles F. Emerick has indeed 

 sought to prove, in The Popular Science Monthly for January, 

 1911, that our modern small families and low birth rates are due almost 

 wholly to the practise of Neo-malthusianism among married couples. 

 But it is a biological fact that women marrying at thirty or older are 

 less fertile than those who marry younger; and the reduced number of 

 children usually resulting from such marriages is doubtless involun- 

 tary in many cases, and partly unintentional, at least, in the rest. The 

 reader is accordingly requested to keep in mind in the following dis- 

 cussion that the economic factors mentioned may reduce the birth rate 

 in either of these two ways or in both at once. The tremendous sig- 

 nificance of the modern knowledge and use of " preventives," in making 

 the birth rate much more dependent upon economic conditions than 

 formerly, is evident. 



Let us now analyze these economic factors somewhat. "We might 

 place them under five heads, as follows: (1) The increased uncertaint}^ 

 of a livelihood among the working people; (2) the great rise in the 

 cost of living without a corresponding rise in wages and salaries; (3) 

 the general ambition among Americans to give their children better 

 food, better clothing, and especially better education than they had 

 themselves, and so to enable them to rise in the social scale; (4) the 

 general entrance of women into all occupations and professions; (5) 

 the demand for luxuries, especially superfluities for children. 



The first factor, uncertainty of livelihood, has increased pari passu 

 •with the concentration of ownership of land and other means of 

 subsistence in fewer and fewer hands and the creation of a rapidly 

 growing proletariat. "Whereas up to the year 1820 only 5 per cent, 

 or less of our population lived in cities of 8,000 or over, and the 

 great majority were independent farmers, in 1910 no less than 33 per 

 cent, lived in such cities, and probably three fourths of them are de- 

 pendent upon their employer for their living. Even the farmers have 

 lost the ownership of their land, largely by mortgaging it. They are 

 then really working for the holder of the mortgage, and only obtain for 

 themselves in the form of net profit, after paying their interest, a wage 

 often smaller than tliat of the city worker in a store or a factory. It 

 is not necessary to quote statistics as to the great number of men un- 

 employed, and so without a living, in the "United States even in good 

 times and without strikes. The labor-market, at least for unskilled 

 labor, is always congested, and during commercial crises, such as that 

 of 1907, and great strikes, hundreds of thousands of working men and 

 women are deprived of their livelihood for considerable periods. This 

 sad state of things makes it cxtromoly difficult or quite impossible for 



