his class of people, is the opportunities for
earning a living. In the earlier days, when the young couple could take
up vacant land, and farming was the goal of all, a large family and the
cooperation of wife and children were a help rather than a hindrance.
To-day the couple, unless the husband has a superior position, must go
together to the factory or mill, and the children are a burden until
they reach the wage-earning age. Furthermore, wage-earning is uncertain,
factories shut down, and the man with a large family is thrown upon his
friends or charity. To admonish people living under these conditions
to go forth and multiply is to advise the cure of race suicide by race
deterioration.

[Illustration: FACULTY OF TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE (From _World's Work_)]

Curiously enough, these observations apply with even greater force to
the second generation of immigrants than to the native stock, for among
the daughters of the foreign-born only 19 per cent of those aged 15 to
24 years are married, while among daughters of native parents 30 per
cent are married; and for the men of 20 to 29 only 26.8 per cent of the
native sons of foreigners are married and 38.5 per cent of the sons of
natives.[127] These figures sustain what can be observed in many large
cities, that the races of immigrants who came to this country
twenty-five or more years ago are shrinking from competition with the
new races from Southern Europe.

Boston, for example, with its large Irish immigration beginning two
generations ago, shows a similar disproportion. Of the American
daughters of foreign parents 15 to 24 years of age, only 12 per cent are
married, but of the daughters of native parents 17 per cent are married;
of the sons of foreign parents 20 to 29 years of age, only 20 per cent
are married, but of the sons of native parents 26 per cent are married.
The contrast with the immigrants themselves is striking. In Boston, 24
per cent of the foreign-born women aged 15 to 24 are married, and 35 per
cent of the foreign-born men aged 20 to 29.[128] In other words, the
early marriages of immigrant men and women are nearly twice as many as
those of the American-born sons and daughters of immigrants, and only
one-third more than those of the sons and daughters of native stock.
With such a showing as this it would seem that our "place among the
world powers" depends indeed on immigration, for the immigrants'
children are more constrained to race suicide tha