Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/363

Rh set by their own particular classes. Consequently the cares of a family are deferred. If one enters the lodging houses in the south and west ends of Boston, for example, one will find a large class of lodgers from northern New England and from the British Provinces, the majority of whom are not married and never will be. This class represents a part of the population which is refraining from marriage in order to keep up its social position. In the words of M. Dumont, 'social capillarity' is so strong that they refrain from marriage. This state of affairs is unfortunate for the future good of the city. Cities have come to depend upon fresh blood from the country to reinforce their declining stock, and there is no reason to believe that former immigrants from rural sections found it necessary to refrain from marriage as the present immigrants do. In other words, a change is taking place in the character of the population of large cities which only the next generation will realize. Cities of the present time are making use of rural Americans and also of the children of rural Americans who came to the city about the middle of the nineteenth century. In the next generation the proportion of children of rural immigrants will be greatly reduced, and the probabilities are that the largest cities will offer small inducements for the immigration of rural Americans.

With this application of the general law of population I pass to the discussion of two conditions in the eastern part of the United States which tend to intensify the action of this law and make the birth rate in this new country as low as it is in some of the old European countries. First, the increased competition which naturally results from a growing population has been augmented by the entrance of women into industrial pursuits. As women find fewer opportunities for marriage, they throw themselves into industrial life, and by their increased competition make the possibility of marriage even more remote. As writers have frequently noted the depression of wages resulting from the competition of women, however, I will pass on to the second phenomenon which affects the social law of population—that is, immigration. Competition resulting from increased population is much more serious if it is caused by the incoming of classes on a different social plane. Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants compete indirectly, and frequently directly with American labor, yet these immigrants live in a different world and under different conditions from the American laborer. Most foreigners form a stratum below Americans. Between the lodging house and the tenement is a wide gap which is not paralleled by an industrial separation. Americans in lodging houses are not attempting so much to raise their standard as they are to retain the accustomed standard of their homes and to save themselves from falling into the social position of the foreign population.