Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/478

474 becomes more and more widespread, the economic factor produces not only this unintentional diminution of births, but also a much larger intentional prevention of children. Mr. Charles F. Emerick has indeed sought to prove, in for January, 1911, that our modern small families and low birth rates are due almost wholly to the practise of Neo-malthusianism among married couples. But it is a biological fact that women marrying at thirty or older are less fertile than those who marry younger; and the reduced number of children usually resulting from such marriages is doubtless involuntary in many cases, and partly unintentional, at least, in the rest. The reader is accordingly requested to keep in mind in the following discussion that the economic factors mentioned may reduce the birth rate in either of these two ways or in both at once. The tremendous significance of the modern knowledge and use of "preventives," in making the birth rate much more dependent upon economic conditions than formerly, is evident.

Let us now analyze these economic factors somewhat. We might place them under five heads, as follows: (1) The increased uncertainty of a livelihood among the working people; (2) the great rise in the cost of living without a corresponding rise in wages and salaries; (3) the general ambition among Americans to give their children better food, better clothing, and especially better education than they had themselves, and so to enable them to rise in the social scale; (4) the general entrance of women into all occupations and professions; (5) the demand for luxuries, especially superfluities for children.

The first factor, uncertainty of livelihood, has increased pari passu with the concentration of ownership of land and other means of subsistence in fewer and fewer hands and the creation of a rapidly growing proletariat. Whereas up to the year 1820 only 5 per cent, or less of our population lived in cities of 8,000 or over, and the great majority were independent farmers, in 1910 no less than 33 per cent, lived in such cities, and probably three fourths of them are dependent upon their employer for their living. Even the farmers have lost the ownership of their land, largely by mortgaging it. They are then really working for the holder of the mortgage, and only obtain for themselves in the form of net profit, after paying their interest, a wage often smaller than that of the city worker in a store or a factory. It is not necessary to quote statistics as to the great number of men unemployed, and so without a living, in the "United States even in good times and without strikes. The labor-market, at least for unskilled labor, is always congested, and during commercial crises, such as that of 1907, and great strikes, hundreds of thousands of working men and women are deprived of their livelihood for considerable periods. This sad state of things makes it extremely difficult or quite impossible for