Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 78.djvu/80

76 growth of cities subjects an increasing proportion of mankind in most progressive countries may well make men hesitate about assuming the responsibility of the marriage relation. Doubtless, also, the business uncertainties and hardships to which people in cities are especially subject during trade reversals contributes to the same state of mind. Besides, the growing prevalence of democracy arouses ambitions and aspirations which enter into competition with a numerous progeny.

There is also evidence of a willingness to take the steps which these conditions demand. In the first place, marriage is postponed at the expense of the child-bearing period of woman, a fact of first importance in lessening the birth rate. It is later marriage among women rather than among men that lessens the size of the family. The postponement of marriage signifies a small increase in the proportion of women who never marry, and a large increase in the proportion who marry either at the end of the child-bearing period or when the time of greatest fertility is partially or wholly over. Later marriages among women are partly of choice and partly of necessity. So far as they are due to men, for one reason or another, proposing later, they are a matter of necessity. So far as they are due to women electing some other alternative, they are a matter of choice. In the one case the preferences of men, and in the other case the preferences of women, are decisive. In either case, however, the matter is voluntarily determined.

In the second place, steps are taken to limit the size of the family subsequent to marriage. It is not necessary for the economist to stake his case entirely upon an increase of continence, though there is little doubt that it has increased.

It is well known that the impediments which occasion involuntary sterility are, to some extent, within the power of medical practitioners to remove. The possibility of the contrary, namely, the "voluntary prevention of conception," is, therefore, an unavoidable inference. That this is more than a possibility appears from the fact that many members of the medical fraternity are approached much more frequently for advice by those who wish to avoid children than by those who wish to have them. This undoubtedly points to the use of "preventives" in numberless instances which escape the notice of physicians. Perhaps the chief difference between the more intelligent and the less intelligent is that the devices employed by the latter are the more crude and harmful. Among the principal causes of the diminishing birth