Some instructive results can be drawn, in this connection, from a study
of the families of Methodist clergymen in the United States.[126]
Although 98 out of every hundred of them marry, and they marry early,
the birth-rate is not high. Its distribution is presented in the
accompanying graph (Fig. 38). It is evident that they have tended to
standardize the two-child family which is so much in evidence among
college professors and educated classes generally, all over the world.
The presence of a considerable number of large families raises the
average number of surviving children of prominent Methodists to 3.12.
And in so explaining the cause of the declining birth-rate among
native-born Americans, we have also found the principal reason for the
_differential_ nature of the decline in the nation at large, which is
the feature that alarms the eugenist. The more intelligent and
well-to-do part of the population has been able to get and use the
needed information, and limit its birth-rate; the poor and ignorant has
been less able to do so, and their rate of increase has therefore been
more natural in a large percentage of cases.
It is not surprising, therefore, that many eugenists should have
advocated wider dissemination of the knowledge of means of limiting
births, with the idea that if this practice were extended to the lower
classes, their birth-rate would decrease just the same as has that of
the upper classes, and the alarming differential rate would therefore be
abolished.
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