In my own neighborhood the small families are the best educated or at least have the best opportunities to educate the children. I know of two families within a day’s travel of my home that have fifteen children each. Thirty children in two poor families! And not a single child obtained a common school education. They were obliged to go out to service before they were fifteen years old, and many at even a younger age. They are good citizens for the single reason that they were raised in the country, where few temptations are found. Had they been born in the city slums, what could have saved them from a life of crime? As it is, not a single child will stand any chance to make the world better for their having lived in it; for they belong to parents who came from prolific families, and where education was only a luxury to be handed over to the wealthy.
If Nature intended men and women to be as helpless in the reproduction of their kind as the fruit tree or the wild animals, the knowledge of reducing the crop would have been withheld from them. And until men gained this knowledge Nature was obliged to step in and reduce the population by famine, disease or earthquake and flood. It was an object lesson against over-population, and to show men that there was no hurry about God’s work. If God is love, he certainly does not desire the job of removing an over-population through the means of some awful calamity or a visitation of disease.
Don’t you suppose the God of nature loves to see men live in comfort and plenty? The Meat Trust and the Kaiser want large families, but the Meat Trust and the Kaiser have motives far removed from bringing happiness into the world. The one wants children to consume more benzoated meat, and the other wants to turn children into soldiers and human butchers.
The man who cries for overgrown families of children, to be brought up in rags and ignorance and slavery, has not the happiness of the race in his heart. He wants them for a selfish, barbarous purpose—for profit and for plunder.
FOR A STAGE CAREER
She was a beautiful woman and her costumes were magnificent, but there seemed to be a lack of soul in her acting. There was applause from the house every time she came on the stage, and seldom she escaped after singing a song in her entrancing voice without returning and singing to an encore. There was the sweetness of despair in her voice, but made a trifle harsh by a spirit of defiance. A trained ear could distinguish the lack of harmony in her soul. The man at my side turned to me as she left the stage and said:
“That poor girl has a history, and a sad one. It is one thing to have a sorrow or an adventure that is absolutely located in the past, but still another thing to have a sorrow and a regret that follows one through life like a shadow.”
I looked at him in wonderment and he continued: “I have met her and she told me of her mistaken life. She was so full of her sorrow and regret that she simply had to talk of it to some one, and I am always a willing listener when a troubled soul opens the secret door and invites me to walk in and sit in the shadow.