478 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



to marry at all, and intentional prevention of children. It is the shame 

 of the twentieth century in the richest nation of the world, that for 

 the great majority of Americans the big, happy, old-fashioned family 

 of six to twelve children has become a luxury, which is absolutely beyond 

 their means. 



Our third factor in reducing the birth rate was the common ambi- 

 tion among our working and middle class people to give their children 

 better advantages of all sorts, to enable them to rise in the social scale. 

 This is surely the leading motive with a great many ambitious parents for 

 intentionally limiting themselves to two or three children. They could 

 afford to feed, clothe and shelter four to six children and send them 

 to the public schools, but they could not give the boys a college educa- 

 tion and a start in business or a profession, and send the girls to college 

 or a finishing school, and also enable them to come out properly. Hence 

 they have only two children, and try to give them all these social advan- 

 tages. This motive for limiting births is probably the chief reason why 

 immigrant families in the United States usually show a markedly 

 lower birth rate in the second and third generations. In the old country 

 escape from the working class was never dreamed of ; but in demo- 

 cratic America they soon learned that thousands of other working people, 

 foreign-born or of foreign-born parents, had raised themselves by indus- 

 try, self denial, and prudence (usually combined with luck and shrewd- 

 ness) to wealth and social position. What wonder that they aspire to do 

 likewise, and that they find prudence absolutely demands a small family ? 



The same desire to give their children every possible advantage to 

 enable them to keep their social position is perhaps much more opera- 

 tive among the middle class as a reason for limitation of children. 

 The fear among middle-class parents of seeing their children sink into 

 the proletariat is probably a stronger motive than the desire of the 

 working-class parents to see their children rise out of it. Witness the 

 fact that the birth rate among the professional class is only one half 

 that of the industrial class. 



We come now to the fourth economic factor in the birth rate : the 

 entrance of women into all sorts of trades and professions, in short 

 the whole modern woman's movement. This is extremely interesting 

 in its relation to eugenics. Let us first consider the effect of the higher 

 education of women. I can find no statistics to prove it, but most 

 authorities, including Dr. J. W. Ballantyne, seem to agree that college 

 women not only marry later, as a rule, but have smaller chances of marry- 

 ing at all than their less educated sisters. Dr. Ballant}me has also 

 pointed out that the higher education of women in America has had a 

 distinct influence in diminishing the birth rate, and that the college- 

 trained girl has certainly not been the mother of many children. As I 

 have already stated, late marriages are always less fertile on the average 



