Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/188

184 In view of the data here presented the college graduate does more towards reproducing the population than does the native American of other classes—this is true even of Bowdoin alumni but not of those of Harvard with a lower marriage rate.

I am well aware that this statement must cause surprise. It is contrary to all tradition, but in harmony with the conditions known to exist in all countries of the old world where recent statistical study has enabled us to make such comparisons.

Resumé.—The data now available indicate that the highly educated male element does more towards reproducing itself than any other large group of our native population. The marriage rate is the same, and the number of surviving children to the family is greater than it is for the native population at large, so that we can no longer accuse the college graduate or, if I may say, 'the highly educated male portion of our population,' of having an exceptionally small family, and of doing less than other groups towards reproducing the population; nor must we lay the blame for the low fecundity of the native American family on higher education. Shortening the term of college study will effect no change. Wealth, luxury and social ambition are cause of the diminishing size of the family and of race decline. The factors are the same which have been active in earlier civilizations as they are to-day: increasing wealth and the introduction of foreign manners are pointed out as causing in ancient Rome the lessening fertility among the better classes which preceded political disruption. Cause and effect were the same and even the methods employed to thwart the tendencies of nature were the same: "Few children are born in the gilded bed, to the wealthy dame, so many artifices has she, and so many drugs, to render women sterile and destroy life within the womb" (Juvenal Sat. VI., 11. 594).

The assumption of a false social position, the struggle for the attainment of luxury even more than its possession, leads to the limitation of the family, by 'the increased amount of restraint exercised,' as one author delicately expresses it, but to speak without circumlocution, by often ruinous measures for the prevention of conception, and by criminal means for the destruction of the product of such conception if it does accidentally occur. Such, in plain words, are the causes which lead to the small size of the American family of all classes.