Among the arguments used by those in favor of spreading contraceptive information is that large families keep the laboring classes down to low living standards, and it would be better for those families and the state that these children were not born. Large families as such do not keep the laboring classes down to low standards of living; bad legislation which allows profiteering, which criminally permits extortion in the prices of food, clothing, in taxes, rents, the cost of coal, and the like, which does not force employers to give laborers an honest price for labor, or check the extortions of monopolists, and a hundred similar economic deeds of injustice, together with a parental shiftlessness, unthrift, alcoholism, lack of education through neglect, and so on indefinitely, are the causes. Big families have more wages than small families, and as a rule they do better than the small families when the children are old enough to work. Society is at fault, not the size of the family; the active and the passive selfish are at fault, not the babies; the liars, hypocrites, and the buttoned pockets are at fault, not the holy innocents; the professional meddlers in the business of better folk are the nuisance, not the blessed children, who are the brightest things in this darkened world until we spoil them, and make them like ourselves instead of better. One decent mother is worth a hundred shirkers who raise nothing but lap dogs.
The children of large families, the birth controllers say, are more afflicted by infectious diseases than those of small families. I was for years in charge of the infectious diseases Bureau of the Washington Health Department, and I have had ample opportunity here and in Europe to study this matter. Large families in proper economic positions are not different from small families as regards the infectious diseases. These diseases spread among the poor because the houses of the poor are commonly owned by land sharks and politicians who laugh at health regulations; our health departments can not get enough money away from the political ringleaders in power to employ capable sanitary experts; our laws for the regulation of medical practice and education are a disgrace to our civilization, and every town is swarming with quacks who can not recognize even smallpox when they see it. The fault here is in ourselves not in the large families. Control the professional politicians and quacks and there will be no occasion for foolish talk about birth control.
Again, the children of poor but large families, we are told, have slight or no chance to rise in the social order. Benjamin Franklin, however, one of the greatest men America has produced, was the youngest of seventeen children in a poor family; Lyman Beecher, a poor man, had eleven children, and every man and woman among them became famous; Theodore Schwann, the father of the cell doctrine and of all modern biology, was one of thirteen poor children; John Mueller, one of the greatest of modern scientists, and the Father of German medicine, was one of five children of a very poor family; Emerson was one of five sons, so was Farragut; John Wesley the founder of Methodism, was the eighteenth child of his parents; Ignatius Loyola was the eighth; Saint Catherine of Sienna, among the greatest women intellectually and morally that Europe ever produced, was the twenty-fourth child of her parents. This list can be extended indefinitely from the biographical dictionaries. Every enormous fortune made in America was built up originally by a man who arose from the depths—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Astor, Ryan, Havemeyer, Schwab, Ford, Gould, and so on. Poverty is a necessary foundation for a great fortune. The great soldiers of the world almost without exception rose from the ranks of poverty—Napoleon, Washington, Sheridan, Grant, Sherman, Pershing, De Lacy in Russia, Prim in Spain, O'Higgins in Chili, Stonewall Jackson, and others. The powerful Dukes of Tetuan in Spain came from an Irish adventurer, the fifth of eight sons of a poor man. Big families make for strength of character in the struggle for existence; the solitary child in a family is pampered, spoiled.
Advocates of birth control say that Holland has had a Neomalthusian League openly operative since 1881, with fifty-two clinics where contraceptive information is publicly given. As a direct consequence, and solely from the work of this League, Holland has a dropping death rate and an increase in population, and even the stature of the Dutch has increased four inches since 1881. The main objection to these statements about Holland is that they are absolutely false in every particular except that the population of Holland has increased—from other causes. Before the great war every civilized nation had a dropping death rate and an increase in population except France where birth control worked against the increase made by the progress of preventive medicine and a diffusion of sanitary methods. The assertion about the fifty-two clinics in Holland was investigated. An army officer sent out by the committee searched fourteen days before he could find even one secret birth control propaganda station. The present prime minister of Holland, de Beerenbrouk, is an earnest Catholic man, and if anyone talks birth control in Holland during his administration he guarantees them a long term in jail. There was really a Neomalthusian League with 6,704 members, now greatly decreased in number, in the northern Protestant provinces of Holland. As a matter of fact just where this league exists the birth rate decreased and the death rate increased and where it did not exist the direct opposite is true. As to the increase of four inches in stature—since this is a physical impossibility the spinner of the original yarn was an ignorant romancer, lacking plausibility in his untruth. Where there is birth control there are no children to increase or maintain the population, but the New York birth controller who invented the Dutch story says that in Holland where there are no children born through birth control the population increases through birth control.
The birth control movement assumes that the world suffers from overpopulation. It does not; it suffers from incorrect distribution of populations, and no doctrine of birth control will ever affect this fact. All the authorities on the statistics of population tell us it requires an average of four children to each family to keep the population even stationary, not to talk of overcrowding. Two children reaching maturity replace their parents, and because of the high mortality in infancy, and the large number of the unmarried and the birth controllers and abortionists, four children are needed to a family to make a new generation as large as the old. An average of one, two, or even three children to a family means a loss in population, unless the loss is supplied, as in the United States, by immigration. An average of five or six children means an increase in the population. Having none or two children to a family and relying on immigration to preserve the nations means political annihilation, as can be readily shown. In New York State in 1919 instead of the required four children to keep the population stationary, as far as the native Americans are concerned, there was one child to every ten families.
The American nation was founded and built up wholly by Nordic races, immigrants from Great Britain and Ireland, Germany, and a few from France, Holland and Sweden. All our national traditions are from these Nordic immigrants, our notions of self government, our peculiar democracy, our constitution, our language and literature. These Nordic peoples are dying out here in appalling numbers for two chief reasons, one of which is birth control and the other is the American climate. The civilization which affects us has always existed along a geographical belt reaching from the British Isles to above Rome, and covering Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, middle and western Germany, and Italy to below Florence. The Grecian civilization was not indigenous, but the result of a Nordic occupation, and it ceased centuries before Christ. Huntington of Yale and several others have shown, by studying the production of thousands of piece workers and students over a long time, that man does his best work physically and mentally under four climatic conditions: a mean temperature of about sixty-two degrees Fahrenheit for physical work and about forty degrees for mental work; secondly, there must be a humidity of about seventy-five per cent.; thirdly, the climate must be variable, be that of the belt of cyclonic storms; fourthly, there must be a quantity of sunlight such as that found in the European racial habitat of the person considered. These conditions are found curiously in exactly these degrees in the civilized parts of Europe and not elsewhere. Above and below that area they are lacking and there has never been any civilization where they are wanting. The reason physical and mental productivity lessen annually with us in December, January, and February is because these climatic conditions are absent during these three months.
Again, men are differentiated into races, thrive, develop, and reach and maintain mental and physical perfection within well defined climatic areas. Nature preserves the race that has acquired through countless ages acclimatization in a given environment, and kills off very quickly immigrants coming from far north or south of the given latitudes. The natural geographical position for the black man is from the equator to the thirtieth parallel of north or south latitude. The thirtieth parallel in America runs through upper Florida, southern Louisiana, and the lowest third of Texas. From the thirtieth to the thirty-fifth parallel is the zone of the brown man, like the Malay. The thirty-fifth parallel runs along the southern border of North Carolina and Tennessee, through the middle of Arkansas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the lowest third of California. From the thirty-fifth to the forty-fifth parallel is the zone of the brune Mediterranean races. The forty-fifth parallel passes near Halifax, Bangor in Maine, Ogdensburg, Ottawa, and St. Paul. In Europe it runs near Bordeaux, Turin, Bosnia, and the Crimea. New York is as far south as Naples, Philadelphia is sixty miles south of Naples, and has the sun of southern Italy. The Nordic races that we are interested in as our origins all live above the United States, and the summer temperatures they have been accustomed to are above the United States. An immigrant coming from northern Ireland to Philadelphia moves southward a thousand miles; a Norwegian going to Texas moves southward two thousand miles, and his family disappears as a rule in two generations.
In historic times there have been sudden movements southward of European races for about seven hundred miles and all ended disastrously. The Lombards went south from upper Prussia to middle Italy at the level of Boston and disappeared in two hundred years. The Teutonic Goths went from the Baltic to Italy and Spain. They lasted sixty-two years in Italy. Eighty thousand Vandals with their families went down from Brandenburg to North Africa at the level of Virginia. They were annihilated by the climate in one hundred and eight years. The Burgundians disappeared in sixty years from Greece, as the Celts who had carried the Homeric sagas to Greece also disappeared. Rome was great while the Nordic Cisalpine Celt ruled it, and died forever with the Celt. Italian art ended at Florence, the southern boundary of Cisalpine Gaul. The Slav disappeared the same way from southeastern Europe and left only language traces to the Turanian and Semite there. No European race of pure blood has ever had grandchildren in the tropics.
The northern races of Europe die out with amazing rapidity in the northern United States. The Irish death rate at the level of New York is double the death rate in Ireland under much worse economic conditions; the death rate of the southern Italian and the southern Russian is much better in New York than it is in their European racial habitats.
In 1910 our English immigration was only six per cent. of the whole, and the Irish immigration is now negligible because there are no more people in Ireland to leave it, but we have seven million Slavs who came in during the ten years before the war. We have three million southern Italians, three million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of nondescript folk from all the back alleys of the old world. At an army camp in Massachusetts during the late war there were thirty languages other than English spoken, and seven thousand men there never had heard the term Anglo-Saxon. The extreme southern, eastern, and southeastern European hordes are overwhelming us, and these hordes never knew a single political principle that even remotely resembles what we understand as American principles. They come of races who were ruled, if they had any rule at all, by despots, but we shall make "Anglo-Saxons," Americans, or whatever you like to call the final metamorphosis we effect, out of these barbarians. Never! Even in a millenium. Centuries from today the Slav here will be a Slav, the Sicilian a Sicilian, the Russian a Russian, all with a veneer of American slang on the tongue of an eternal racial character. Whole counties of Pennsylvania are filled with Germans who have been here since before the Revolution and they have not so much as learned English yet. The Nordic peoples die out here. Only the dark-skinned southern Germans last with us; the sun kills out the red and blond in two or three generations. I recently went over fifty Irish families which I knew perfectly, and they have degenerated eighty-six per cent. numerically and otherwise in my own lifetime: killed off by the climate which keeps our southern states empty of white men. By two American censuses and one English we know that fifty per cent. of Washington's army was born in Ireland, but there are no Irish in the revolutionary societies because the Revolutionary Irish have disappeared.