Page:Personal Beauty and Racial Betterment.djvu/100

 of different origins, or whether it will die out leaving only its ashes and embers, remains to be seen. In either event, it will have left effects upon the problem of racial betterment. Sexual restraints once thrown off by the individual are seldom regained; sexual restraints thrown off by any important social group are regained only by a slow process of group-reconstruction if at all. This is an inevitable consequence of the nature of such conventions.

The overlimitation of families by married couples of desirable grade is apparently due less to the tendencies of the husbands than to those of the wives. It is a common fallacy to assume that the maternal instinct is far stronger than the paternal. The explicit desire for children is common to young men of the better type—and I believe, more common than among young women of corresponding grade. Children recognize this instinct and respond to its manifestations in a striking way. It is indeed something of which many a young man is rather ashamed—clearly because it is explicit, and a part of his normal sex impulse. The implicit effects of this instinct are even more remarkable, for it can be detected in the whole cycle of behavior which finally lands the man in matrimony. Whereas women have strong economic reasons for marrying, men as a rule have economic reasons against it: but although all the