least after forty.[57] On the moral
side, too, very few criminals are found among married people.

[57] ARNOLD LORAND, _Old Age Deferred. The Cause of Old Age and its
Postponement by Hygienic and Therapeutic Measures._ F.A. Davis Co.,
1911.

If children come to bless these homes of men and women, then even
intellectual life may shift to a higher level than was before possible.
With advancing years intellectual interests tend to become specialized.
The man or woman gives up singing, ceases to be interested in plant
life, stops reading poetry. One activity after another is cut off and
interests concentrate in some comparatively small field of work or
pleasure. But when a child comes, the parents are forced to start over
the round of human interests and thought once more. Before, they lived
it as children; now, they live the cycle as grown men and women.

No matter how completely a woman has given up music, she will some day
find herself singing when she holds her baby in her arms. As she recites
Mother Goose and the fairy and folk-lore tales, she moves through the
path of man's upward progress, led by a child, but with the life and
understanding of adult years. As she walks with her child in the garden
and in the fields, she is driven to a new interpretation of the world
of nature. Few things can so broaden, quicken and enrich the
intellectual life as growing up with one's children.

On the social side, a parent who has children is forced to live in all
the social world around him. The water-supply, the sewage, pure foods,
vacant lots, paving, fast driving in the streets, police protection,
undesirable residents, saloons and churches, schools and
libraries--everything that touches the social well-being--touches him
vitally and imperatively. The foot-loose celibate can always go away.
The parent finds it difficult to leave the place where he has planted
his roof-tree. Of course, there are many unmarried people, and people
who are childless, who live this domestic life vicariously through
friends or other people's children. One cannot but be grateful that life
is so organized that no woman can be entirely shut off, unless she wills
it, from the fructifying life that knits together the generations of the
old and the young.

Ideals are very powerful in determining conduct, and the ideals of
extreme individualism, now so constantly presented by certain leaders
among emancipated women, must bear bitter fruit for an army of