is now as it ever has been, a bane to
any nation, a curse to society, a menace to the home, an incitement to
married unhappiness and to immorality, an evil thing for men and a still
more hideous evil for women. These unpleasant tendencies in our American
life are made evident by articles such as those which I actually read
not long ago in a certain paper, where a clergyman was quoted, seemingly
with approval, as expressing the general American attitude when he said
that the ambition of any save a very rich man should be to rear two
children only, so as to give his children an opportunity "to taste a few
of the good things of life."

This man, whose profession and calling should have made him a moral
teacher, actually set before others the ideal, not of training children
to do their duty, not of sending them forth with stout hearts and ready
minds to win triumphs for themselves and their country, not of allowing
them the opportunity, and giving them the privilege of making their own
place in the world, but, forsooth, of keeping the number of children so
limited that they might "taste a few good things!" The way to give a
child a fair chance in life is not to bring it up in luxury, but to see
that it has the kind of training that will give it strength of
character. Even apart from the vital question of national life, and
regarding only the individual interest of the children themselves,
happiness in the true sense is a hundredfold more apt to come to any
given member of a healthy family of healthy-minded children, well
brought up, well educated, but taught that they must shift for
themselves, must win their own way, and by their own exertions make
their own positions of usefulness, than it is apt to come to those whose
parents themselves have acted on and have trained their children to act
on, the selfish and sordid theory that the whole end of life is to
"taste a few good things."

The intelligence of the remark is on a par with its morality; for the
most rudimentary mental process would have shown the speaker that if the
average family in which there are children contained but two children
the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in
two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of
extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and selfish
doctrine would be giving place to others with braver and more robust
ideals. Nor would such a result be in any way regrettable