ial effect of legislation
against child-labour in reducing an unduly high birth-rate has often
been pointed out.

[129] It may suffice to take a single point. Large families involve the
birth of children at very short intervals. It has been clearly shown by
Dr. R.J. Ewart ("The Influence of Parental Age on Offspring," _Eugenics
Review_, October, 1911) that children born at an interval of less than
two years after the birth of the previous child, remain, even when they
have reached their sixth year, three inches shorter and three pounds
lighter than first-born children.

[130] For instance, Goldscheid, in _Hoeherentwicklung und
Menschenoekonomie_; it is also, on the whole, the conclusion of
Newsholme, though expressed in an exceedingly temperate manner, in his
_Declining Birth-rate_.

[131] If, however, our birth-rate fanatics should hear of the results
obtained at the experimental farm at Roseville, California, by Professor
Silas Wentworth, who has found that by placing ewes in a field under the
power wires of an electric wire company, the average production of lambs
is more than doubled, we may anticipate trouble in many hitherto small
families. Their predecessors insisted, in the cause of religion and
morals, on burning witches; we must not be surprised if our modern
fanatics, in the same holy cause, clamour for a law compelling all
childless women to live under electric wires.

[132] J. Holt Schooling, "The English Marriage Rate," _Fortnightly
Review_, June, 1901.

[133] G. Udny Yule, "Changes in the Marriage-and Birth-rate in England,"
_Journal of the Royal Statistical Society_, March, 1906.

[134] At an earlier period Hooker had investigated the same subject
without coming to any very decisive conclusions ("Correlation of the
Marriage-rate with Trade," _Journ. Statistical Soc._, September, 1901).
Minor fluctuations in marriage and in trade per head, he found, tend to
be in close correspondence, but on the whole trade has risen and the
marriage-rate has fallen, probably, Hooker believed, as the result of
the gradual deferment of marriage.

[135] The higher standard need not be, among the mass of the population,
of a very exalted character, although it marks a real progress.
Newsholme and Stevenson (_op. cit._) term it a higher "standard of
comfort." The decline of the birth-rate, they say, "is associated with a
general raising of the standard of comfort, and is an expression of the
determination of the peop