Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/484

480 earlier than they otherwise could, and perhaps have more children. In England, at any rate, the birth rate is highest in those counties where we find the largest proportion of women employed in factories; namely, in the urban, industrial counties of Nottingham, Staffordshire and Durham. Here we also find large numbers of married women, who are under age—in Durham over 23 per cent.—and the highest infant mortality. The infants born to these working girls have the highest mortality from premature birth, deficient vitality and all congenital defects; and all these working mothers have such a high death rate from all causes among their neglected children, that the increase of births, which results from this employment of young women, is wholly undesirable and results in deterioration of the population.

The last factor in my list was the increased demand for luxuries. A great many young men of marriageable age in the business and professional classes postpone marriage year after year, and perhaps renounce it altogether, because of the false idea that they must provide a wife with a six-room house, two servants, cut glass, fine furniture, fine clothes, and all the other luxuries which she or her richer friends enjoy. In short he "must have at least five thousand a year." The same selfish refusal to give up any unnecessary creature comforts after marriage makes many women stifle their maternal instinct and spend their substance on automobiles instead of on children. Mr. Roosevelt's well known sermons against race suicide as a selfish, unpatriotic shirking by modern women of their highest duty to the state indeed applies with fairness only to wealthy women, who deliberately barter their unborn children for luxury and freedom from maternal suffering and cares; "but these rich women and their husbands, who are equally to blame, well deserve our ex-president's stern reproofs. In this modern growth of luxury the most dangerous feature from the eugenic point of view is the superfluity of things demanded for children by middle-class parents "in order to keep up with the procession," as the phrase is. This "keeping up with the procession" has an interesting sociological basis, which deserves mention here.

The phrase really means the attempt to equal one's neighbors and business acquaintances in all the externals of life, particularly in dress, in order to maintain or better one's social position. And the economic basis of this well-nigh universal endeavor to dress better than one can afford is the class struggle. The upper classes always feel that they must show their superiority by dressing more expensively or in some new style; while the lower classes as continually attempt to obliterate this class distinction by imitating their dress and manners.

The following quotation from a recent article in the Ix)S Angeles Times shows what the modern standard of expenditure for boys and girls is in the middle class.