Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 9.djvu/505

 Rh the monogamous; as witness Germans and Turks, Russians and Persians, Britons and Hindoos.

Similarly, polygamy would add from 30,000 to 40,000 children per year to the population of Massachusetts, with no increase whatever in the number of producers. In eighteen years, at least 500,000 non-producers would be added to the Commonwealth. The first result would be, as the pressure slowly increased, that children would be withdrawn from school at an earlier age, and put to severer tasks, women would more and more be forced into the field and workshop, with still a decided increase of poverty. Despite these extra exertions against it, cases of want would greatly multiply; all the weaker constitutions would encounter extra risks, because there would be both extra exactions upon them, and less surplus to provide for their extra wants; and thus the evil temporarily avoided in one direction would come around with redoubled force in another. Where monogamy, legally enforced, possibly prevents the birth of 30,000 children annually, polygamy would in time result in more than 30,000 extra deaths; there would, meantime, be less of average food, clothing, schoolbooks, cheap excursions, and healthful amusements, less of everything that makes life possible or desirable, a decided increase in the aggregate of unhappiness, and still a dead loss in the wealth of the community. That all these results are to be witnessed in Utah is the testimony of travelers of every shade of belief, though Utah is a new country, and free from many of the difficulties which would be met with in Massachusetts.

At this point a side-issue presents itself, which it may be well to consider. My observation in Utah, and comparison with Eastern communities, convince me that there is a certain normal rate of increase, beyond which it is scarcely possible for an Anglo-Saxon community to go; or, if possible, very undesirable. I mean, of course, natural increase, immigration being left out of the account. Settle a new country with nearly equal numbers of the sexes, and the population will increase very rapidly as long as the unappropriated wealth of Nature continues; it will even double, from natural causes alone, every twenty-five years, until most of the land is occupied. Then a noticeable decline in the rate of increase will ensue; and such rate will decrease with almost constant regularity as the population increases. It will be manifest in three ways: people will marry later in life, successively larger numbers will remain unmarried, and the average number of children to each family will be less. The large number of unmarried women in Massachusetts, the considerably smaller number in Indiana, and the very small number in California, are thus seen to be legitimate results of the relative ages of those communities. Of course, new inventions, enabling each producer to get more of the necessaries of life from the same amount of labor, will have a similar effect to that of unappropriated natural wealth, and this enables some