10 THE COMMON SENSE OF THE MILK QUESTION 



by 1.5 per thousand, while among the whites of for- 

 eign parentage the excess of births over deaths was 

 44.5 per thousand." It is perfectly obvious that if 

 this condition were common to all the states, the 

 native stock would soon be entirely extinct. 



Ill 



It is a well-known fact that the fecundity of the 

 poorer classes is always greater than that of the well- 

 to-do classes. More than twenty years before the ap- 

 pearance of the famous and epochal work of Malthus, 

 Adam Smith had pointed out in The Wealth of 

 Nations that poverty seemed favorable to procrea- 

 tion." All authorities upon the subject agree that 

 in all countries the wealthiest classes are the most 

 infertile. Polybius attributed the decay of Greece 

 to depopulation by this means. Like Mr. Roosevelt, 

 he regarded the evil as a moral one : — 



"In our times all Greece has been afflicted with a 

 failure of offspring, in a word with a scarcity of men; 

 so that the cities have been left desolate and the land 

 waste ; though we have not been visited either with a 

 series of wars or with epidemic diseases. Would it 

 not be absurd to send to inquire of the oracles by what 

 means our numbers may be increased, and our cities 

 become flourishing, when the cause is manifest, and 

 the remedy rests with ourselves ? For when men gave 



