CHAPTER XIII
INCREASE OF THE BIRTH-RATE OF THE SUPERIOR
Imagine 200 babies born to parents of native stock in the United States. On the average, 103 of them will be boys and 97 girls. By the time the girls reach a marriageable age (say 20 years), at least 19 will have died, leaving 78 possible wives, on whom the duty of perpetuating that section of the race depends.
We said "Possible" wives, not probable; for not all will marry. It is difficult to say just how many will become wives, but Robert J. Sprague has reported on several investigations that illuminate the point.
In a selected New England village in 1890, he says, "there were forty marriageable girls between the ages of 20 and 35. To-day thirty-two of these are married, 20 per cent. are spinsters.
"An investigation of 260 families of the Massachusetts Agricultural College students shows that out of 832 women over 40 years of age 755 or 91 per cent. have married, leaving only 9 per cent. spinsters. This and other observations indicate that the daughters of farmers marry more generally than those of some other classes.
"In sixty-nine (reporting) families represented by the freshman class of Amherst College (1914) there are 229 mothers and aunts over 40 years of age, of whom 186 or 81 per cent. have already married.
"It would seem safe to conclude that about 15 per cent. of native women in general American society do not marry during the child-bearing period." Deducting 15 per cent. from the 78 possible wives leaves sixty-six probable wives. Now among the native wives of Massachusetts 20 per cent. do not produce children, and deducting these thirteen childless ones from the sixty-six probable wives leaves fifty-three probable, married, child-bearing women, who must be depended on to reproduce the original 200 individuals with whom we began this chapter. That means that each woman who demonstrates ability to bear offspring must bear 3.7 children. This it must be noted, is a minimum number, for no account has been taken of those who, through some defect or disease developed late in life, become unmarriageable. In general, unless every married woman brings three children to maturity, the race will not even hold its own in numbers. And this means that each woman must bear four children, since not all the children born will live. If the married women of the country bear fewer than nearly four children each, the race is in danger of losing ground.
Such a statement ought to strike the reader as one of grave importance; but we labor under no delusion that it will do so. For we are painfully aware that the bugaboo of the declining birth-rate of superior people has been raised so often in late years, that it has become stale by repetition. It no longer causes any alarm. The country is filled with sincere but mentally short-sighted individuals, who are constantly ready to vociferate that numbers are no very desirable thing in a birth-rate; that quality is wanted, not quantity; that a few children given ideal care are of much more value to the state and the race than are many children, who can not receive this attention.