172 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
from wholesale dealers and expense is no consideration; they use 
mechanical more frequently than drug preventives. In the case 
of abortion, there is no connivance with the medical profession, 
but women apply for a medicine on the ground of some slight 
irregularity and then take such large doses as to produce the 
desired effect. The middle class also as a rule adopts Neo-Mal- 
thusian practices; appliances are purchased in chemists’ shops, 
but they are also obtained from various barbers and tobacconists. 
Among the very poor, although the desire to limit the family is 
filtering down to them, more natural lives are led; they cannot in 
fact afford drugs, etc., but they are less ‘sophisticated’ and act 
more instinctively. There is no doubt that the habit of artificial 
limitation is growing rapidly in both the upper and middle classes, 
but our correspondent’s experience brought him more closely in 
touch with skilled artisans, clerks, small shopkeepers, with from 
£2 a week income upwards. Those with more than £250 a year 
tend to a proportionally larger use of mechanical preventives. 
Voluntary self-restraint, or cohabitation at certain times only 
has hardly anything to do with the decline in the birth rate in this 
class. The current tone in the matter may be illustrated by two 
stories, the one told by a married woman with wide experience, 
namely, that if you hear a knot of young married women of this 
class talking together, the chances are that the topic will be the 
means of prevention, and the second the words of a male acquaint- 
ance to our correspondent himself ‘on the arrival of one of my 
youngsters’: ‘Well, you are a fool,—and you in a chemist’s 
shop!’ ” 
That family limitation was not more prevalent earlier may be 
in part ascribed to the fact that such a possibility never occurred 
to the majority of parents. The perpetuation of the race simply 
went on in a natural way as it does among the lower animals, and 
however undesirable may have been the results of unrestricted 
multiplication, relatively little effort was made to check the 
number of births. The surplus humanity was taken care of by a 
high death rate, assisted occasionally by war, pestilence, famine, 
and here and there by infanticide. 
