Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/281

Rh Dr. Engelmann claims that an older age at marriage does not mean a smaller family, that the marriage rate of the college graduate is higher and the size of the surviving family larger than in the population at large, and that the decreasing size of family is entirely voluntary. We think that he has established none of these conclusions. Adequate statistics may not be at hand correlating the size of family with the age of marriage, but it seems almost certain that there is an inverse correlation, those who marry later having fewer children. This would hold especially for women—and older men are likely to marry older women—and for men who remarry. It is also of course true that earlier marriages produce a more rapid sequence of generations and a larger population.

Dr. Engelmann gives 2.1 as the size of family of graduates more than twenty years out of college and 1.9 as the size of family of the native-born in Massachusetts, and tells us that the college graduate does more towards reproducing the population than does the native American of other class. He appears to be in serious error in his statistics. A certain loyal Princeton graduate discovered that his class of '76 had 2.7 surviving children for each married graduate. Whether this case is typical or not we do not know, but Dr. Engelmann gives it the same weight in his average as the 1.86 obtained from 1,401 Harvard graduates. The families of Princeton and Yale graduates and of many Harvard graduates coming from a region having higher fertility can not be compared with the decadent native population of Massachusetts, nor can college graduates in part of foreign origin be compared with the exclusively native population. Dr. Engelmann compares the native surviving Massachusetts family of 1.9 with that of college graduates of more than twenty years' standing. The native population includes girls of fourteen and women just married. The average number of living children of native women of Massachusetts between the ages of forty and forty-nine was 2.13. With this family and a marriage rate of 79 per cent, the population is rapidly decreasing. Harvard graduates, with a marriage rate of 71.4 and a family of 1.86 surviving for a time are destined to even more rapid extermination. The Harvard graduate of New England stock is doubtless still more infertile, but we have no exact information in regard to this, nor as to whether or not the college graduate is more infertile than the race and class from which he comes. ]