76 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



growth of cities subjects an increasing proportion of mankind in most 

 progressive countries may well make men hesitate about assuming the 

 responsibility of the marriage relation. Doubtless, also, the business 

 uncertainties and hardships to which people in cities are especially 

 subject during trade reversals contributes to the same state of mind. 

 Besides, the growing prevalence of democracy arouses ambitions and 

 aspirations which enter into competition with a numerous progeny. 



There is also evidence of a willingness to take the steps which these 

 conditions demand. In the first place, marriage is postponed at the 

 expense of the child-bearing period of woman, a fact of first importance 

 in lessening the birth rate. It is later marriage among women rather 

 than among men that lessens the size of the family. The postpone- 

 ment of marriage signifies a small increase in the proportion of women 

 who never marry, and a large increase in the proportion who marry 

 either at the end of the child-bearing period or when the time of great- 

 est fertility is partially or wholly over. Later marriages among women 

 are partly of choice and partly of necessity. So far as they are due 

 to men, for one reason or another, proposing later, they are a matter of 

 necessity. So far as they are due to women electing some other alter- 

 native, they are a matter of choice. In the one case the preferences of 

 men, and in the other case the preferences of women, are decisive. In 

 either case, however, the matter is voluntarily determined. 



In the second place, steps are taken to limit the size of the family 

 subsequent to marriage. It is not necessary for the economist to stake 

 his case entirely upon an increase of continence, though there is little 

 doubt that it has increased. 



There are vicious measures, not here to be named in detail, which keep 

 down the number of births or increase the number of deaths, mostly prenatal, 

 though the infanticide of earlier times is not extinct. By strength and also by 

 weakness, by virtue and also by vice, is the economic mandate which limits the 

 rate of growth of population carried out. 4 



It is well known that the impediments which occasion involuntary 

 sterility are, to some extent, within the power of medical practitioners 

 to remove. The possibility of the contrary, namely, the "voluntary 

 prevention of conception," is, therefore, an unavoidable inference. 

 That this is more than a possibility appears from the fact that many 

 members of the medical fraternity are approached much more fre- 

 quently for advice by those who wish to avoid children than by those 

 who wish to have them. This undoubtedly points to the use of " preven- 

 tives" in numberless instances which escape the notice of physicians. 

 Perhaps the chief difference between the more intelligent and the less 

 intelligent is that the devices employed by the latter are the more crude 

 and harmful. Among the principal causes of the diminishing birth 



* Clark, " Essentials of Economic Theory," p. 334. 



