Page:Counter-currents, Agnes Repplier, 1916.djvu/292

Counter-Currents and birth-control, to build barriers around a marriage license, and to dramatize impassioned pleas for sterility, when the birthrate of the Republic is nobody's concern? If the survival of the fittest means as much to the commonwealth as to the family, why should we fiddle over pathology while the nation burns?

Miss Kellor is not the only kindhearted American who holds her countrymen to blame for the deficiencies of the immigrant. Her point of view is a common one, and has some foundation in fact. She censures us even for his dirt, though if she had ever listened to the vitriolic comments of the police, she might revise her judgment on that score. "Can't you do anything?" I once asked a disconsolate guardian of the peace, who stood on a fine hot day contemplating the forth-flung garbage of the Israelite. To which he made answer: "Did ye iver thry to clane out a sthable wid a toothpick?" And as this had not been one of 276