Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/636

614 A few were more highly educated, and yet as large a proportion of the latter as of the former have married, and the largest families of the present generation belong to the most highly educated of the women.

Within a stone's-throw of where I sit are half a dozen well-to-do American families. Taken together, there are not as many children in them as there are parents, and in none of them will there presumably be any increase. Not one of these mothers is in any sense a highly educated woman.

In one hundred and seventy-five American families I find an average of 3·2 children (now adults in most cases) to each. In one sixth of them there is but one child each. (No childless families are included.) Of the few really large families, the evidence seems to be that the mothers were in most cases well educated; in a few cases, exceptionally so. Taken as a whole, they represent a very wide range of female education, from the most ordinary to the highest which the time afforded. I have made many inquiries as to the proportion of children in American and foreign families in the schools of Brooklyn and New York, and I find that in the German, Irish, and Italian families there are two, three, and four times as many children, upon an average, as there are in the American family.

It would be difficult for even the most prejudiced observer to attribute these maternal deficiencies to the "higher education of women"; and it is a little singular that we are so often treated to a bald statement of the "higher-education" theory, without any facts being adduced by which to prove it. The diminishing and vanishing native family is a fact, but a fact which must be accounted for in some other way than the one proposed.

In turning elsewhere for an explanation, we will leave out of our present discussion those men—and their name is legion—who have brought to their wedded lives only the remnant of a vitiated or shattered constitution, or those in whom the instinct of fatherhood seems to be so nearly wanting, that they are not willing to make any of the sacrifices incident to the rearing of a family; and will consider the question solely from conditions which obtain with the other sex.

Here the two great primary causes are—1. Physical disability. 2. Disinclination to bear and rear children. We will briefly consider these in their order, though their order could well be reversed if in that lay any indication of their relative importance.

There is something almost ludicrous in the spectacle of a physician, educated and professedly observing, passing over without a word all the death-dealing follies which are making invalids of tens of thousands of women all about him, while he lifts his voice in dismal croaking over the awful prospect which looms before his jaundiced vision, of a time when more women shall be educated. Forgetting all else, he might have spared one thought for that doomed multitude, shut off