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Page 26
What is the alternative?
To miss all this and live a barren life and a loveless old age. Perhaps
to bear a child, that, for the need of the educative, elevating
companionship of family mates is consumed by self, inheriting that
vicious selfishness, which he by his birth defeated, and finding all the
forces of nature focussed on his defect, like a pack of hounds that turn
and rend an injured mate.
Or a family of one, after years of parental care and love, education and
expense, dies or turns a rake, and the canker of remorse takes his place
in the broken hearts.
Nature's laws are not broken with impunity--as a great Physician has
said, "She never forgives and never forgets."
Self-preservation and race-preservation together constitute the law of
life, just as Conservation of Matter and Conservation of Energy
constitute the Law of Substance in Haeckels Monistic Philosophy, and the
severest altruism will permit man to follow his highest self-interest in
obedience to these laws. It is only a perverted and vicious
self-interest that would tempt him to infraction.
That the vice of oliganthropy is growing amongst normal and healthy
people is a painful and startling fact. In New Zealand the prevailing
belief is that a number of children adds to the cares and
responsibilities of life more than they add to its joys and pleasures,
and many have come to think with John Stuart Mill, that a large family
should be looked on with the same contempt as drunkenness.
CHAPTER VII.
WHO PREVENT.
_Desire for family limitation result of our social system._--_Desire and
practice not uniform through all classes._--_The best limit, the worst
do not._--_Early marriages and large families._--_N.Z. marriage rates.
Those who delay, and those who abstain from marriage._--_Good motives
mostly actuate._--_All limitation implies restraint._--_Birth-rates vary
inversely with prudence and self-control._--_The limited family usually
born in early married life when progeny is less likely to be well
developed._--_Our worst citizens most prolific._--_Effect of poverty on
fecundity._--_Effect of alcoholic intemperance._--_Effect of mental and
physical defects._--_Defectives propagate their kind._--_The
intermittent inhabitants of Asylums and Gaols constitute the greatest
danger to society._--_Character the resultant of two forces--motor
impulse and inhibition._--_Chief criminal characteristic is defective
inhibition._--_This defect is strongly hereditary._--_It expresses
itself in unrestrained fertility._
It has been sufficiently demonstrated in preceding chapters, that the
birth-rate has been, and is still rapidly declining. It has been sought
to prove that this decline is chiefly due to voluntary means taken by
married people to limit their families, and that the desire for this
limitation is the result of our social system.
The important question now arises. Is the desire uniform through all
classes of Society, and is the practice of prevention uniform through
all classes?
In other words, is the decline in the birth-rate due to prevention in
one class more than in another, and if so which?
Experience and statistics force us to the startling conclusion, that the
birth-rate is declining amongst the best classes of citizens, and
remains undisturbed amongst the worst.
Now the first-class responsible for the decline includes those who do
not marry, and those who marry late. The Michigan vital statistics for
1894 (p. 125) show that the mean number of children to each marriage at
the age of 15-19 years is 6.75, at the age of 20-25 years it is 5.32, a
difference of 1.44 in favour of delayed marriage for a period of five
years.
In New Zealand the marriage rate has gone up from 5.97 per thousand
persons living in 1888 to 7.67 in 1900.
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