Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/184

172 marry, and where the burden of maternity is thus most evenly shared between them. Admitting that certain women may have good reasons for avoiding maternity on various grounds unfitness, or, what is probably much the same thing at bottom, disinclination and admitting also that where such good reasons exist, it is best those women should remain unmarried, we must still feel that in most cases marriage is in itself desirable, and that limited families are better than large ones. In other words, it is best for the community at large that most women should marry, and should have moderate families, rather than that fewer should marry and have unwieldily large ones; for if families are moderate there will be a greater reserve of health and strength left in the mothers for each birth, the production of children can be spread more slowly over a longer time, and the family resources will be less heavily taxed for their maintenance and education. Incidentally this will benefit both parents as well as the community. That is to say, where many marriages and small families are the rule, the children will on the average be born healthier, be better fed, and be launched more fairly on the world in the end. Where marriages are fewer and families large, the strain of maternity will be most constant and most heavily felt; the father will be harder worked, and the children will be born feebler, will be worse fed, and will start worse equipped in the battle of life.

Hence I would infer that the goal a wise community should keep in view is rather more marriages and fewer children per marriage, than fewer marriages and more children per marriage.

Or, to put these conclusions another way: in any case, the vast majority of women in any community must needs become wives and mothers; and in the best ordered community the largest possible number will doubtless become so, in order to distribute the burden equally, and to produce in the end the best results for the nation.

Well, it may be brutal and unmanly to admit these facts or to insist upon these facts, as we are often told it is by maiden ladies; but still, if we are to go on existing at all, we must look the facts fairly and squarely in the face, and must see how modern tendencies stand with regard to them.

Now, I have the greatest sympathy with the modern woman's demand for emancipation. I am an enthusiast on the Woman Question. Indeed, so far am I from wishing to keep her in subjection to man, that I should like to see her a great deal more emancipated than she herself as yet at all desires. Only, her emancipation must not be of a sort that interferes in any way with