112 Heredity and Environment 



eldest sons of peers have found wives in America, and 

 of these thirteen are childless ; other five have no 

 sons, and the remaining twelve have only thirty- 

 nine children, whereof eighteen are sons ; and that of 

 other forty-four titled Americans (excluding wives of 

 knights) seventeen have no child, and eight only one. 

 Thus of the seventy-four titled Americans (excluding 

 wives of knights) thirty are childless, fourteen have 

 only one, and the children of the seventy-four number 

 only 107 — an average of less than one and a half per 

 family. The writer points with satisfaction to the 

 superior fertility of the colonials, for of the wives of 

 twenty-three peers or eldest sons of peers who married 

 in the colonies, four have no children, but the remaining 

 nineteen have sixty-three, of whom twenty-nine are 

 sons ; while seventy-two colonial wives of Englishmen 

 with courtesy titles or of baronets have 203 children. 

 The ninety-five colonial wives have 266 children — an 

 average of two and three-quarters per family. The 

 estimated average English family in the same period 

 was over four, but probably the families in the cor- 

 responding classes in England were no larger than the 

 colonial. The article goes on to ask if President Roose- 

 velt or the Bishop of London dare say that the failure 

 of the eighteen American peeresses to have heirs was 

 wilful, or deny them an eager desire to have the glory 

 of presenting their husbands with an heir to the title. 

 Nature, to ensure maintenance of the species, has deeply 

 implanted in woman's nature the maternal instinct, 

 and in some cases at least it is as potent as self-preser- 

 vation. It may be defeated, as suicides defeat the 

 instinct to live, and perhaps the cases where a healthy 

 childless wife seeks, without some special reason more 

 or less excusable, to evade maternity, may compare in 

 number not very favourably with those of suicide. The 

 frivolities and follies of a small section of wealthy 



