be able to
get these things distributed in such a way as to do the most good. We
are all working for a better world, but are we working hard enough? I
sometimes think that we are not working so hard as we might, because our
stake in that better scheme of things is not large enough. If we dared
to have three or four children, with all the sacrifices implied, I
wonder whether this fact would not sharpen our scent on the trail of the
better America.

Lord Bacon said that those who have children have given hostages to
fortune. But I am inclined to think that those who have made large and
important bargains with chance are just those who will move heaven and
earth to guard against mischance. One aspect of the better America,
proposed by the American Eugenic Society, will perhaps be the adoption
of a sliding-wage scale, characterized by a rise in pay upon marriage
and with the arrival of each successive child.

That thoughtful people of our time, whether rich or not, will soon
return to having families as large as our grandparents' is extremely
unlikely. To bear ten or fifteen children would probably kill most
modern women or so completely wear them out that the remnant of their
lives would not be worth living. And families of this size would
similarly exhaust even unusually large pocket-books, leaving most
fathers insolvent. Though it is probably true, as economists say, that
our land and its resources, if more equitably distributed and
scientifically exploited, are capable of supporting many more millions
of Americans than at present, there seems to be no good reason for
stepping up the modern middle-class family beyond four or five children.

The reader will notice that I have been going on the assumption that
people can have children, and fine specimens at that, to order--when and
as they please. This is to a large extent true. The key to the mystery
is the doctor. Modern medical schools and modern law have entrusted into
his hands not only the physical but the mental well-being of his
patients. The tight interlocking of the body and spirit has been
everywhere recognized, and the impossibility, in many illnesses, of
healing one without treating the other. Positive well-being in the body,
so important for the begetting of strong children, is practically
inconceivable apart from positive happiness in the mind.

Thus it has become a prime tenet of eugenics that babies must not be
conceived under conditions of excessive m