164 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



Our youngest poet of the workaday world may not be quite justified 

 in singing, "The days that make us happy make us wise"; but 

 assuredly they do make us more inclined to depend on ourselves and 

 to trust the common lot. Of course, it would be an idle mockery to 

 assert that all pain and suffering will be eliminated by scientific 

 progress and economic development; but the possible betterment is 

 so tremendous that it can hardly be overstated. Much is being done, 

 as we all know; but the advance in the next few decades may well 

 make earlier progress seem like stagnation. 



In all probability the most striking improvement will be in the 

 rearing of children, and this will be greatly facilitated by a declining 

 birth-rate. The fundamentally and demonstrably unfit will not long 

 be allowed to propagate their like, to be a bane to themselves, a drag 

 to their struggling fellow-men. And the present prolific but poverty- 

 burdened proletariat will learn, or be taught, to refrain from 

 procreation that is a mere accident of lust, wherein the gratification 

 of a moment may bring into being a life that is destined to number 

 its weary length of years by pain. Nor will women, even of the 

 humbler classes, if classes there must be, consent to a motherhood 

 that degrades them to mere links in the age-long chain of human 

 misery. Instead of hutches of starveling offspring, with woeful 

 bodies and lowering faces, will be seen cheerful homes with two or 

 three children, sweet and well nurtured and pure souled — the most 

 gladsome sight that gives joy to any unspoiled human heart. Men of 

 intellect and authority, spurred by a sanguine temperament, may 

 repeat the legendary injunction uttered on the threshold of an empty 

 world, "Increase and multiply." Weak-willed, ignorant slaves of 

 passion may continue to cast the burden of their indulgence on the 

 Lord, trusting that he will provide. But Science will declare, and 

 common-sense must agree, that the exhortation of the reckless 

 optimist and the excuse of the improvident parent are alike utterly 

 out of place "in an age in which the earth and sea, if not indeed 

 the very air, swarm with countless myriads of undistinguished and 

 indistinguishable human creatures, until the beauty of the world is 

 befouled and the glory of the heavens bedimmed. To stem back 



