ng quality of their
love. This is sometimes impossible, however, and for this reason and
others I think it is just as well for married people to wait a year or
even two before having their first child. In the happiest marriages
there are many adjustments, unforeseen before the wedding, to be made.
And it may very well be that only in the continued intimacy of marriage
can the strength of love be tested. Only there can love gutter out or
prove itself stronger than death--so much stronger indeed, that, as it
deepens and widens in fullness and power, it turns of its own accord
directly toward the creation of more life.

* * * * *

In other words, the best time to have children is when the lovers, sure
of themselves and of each other, feel an imperious need to stamp the
gold of life with each other's images. I feel no hesitancy in urging
married couples to take a year or so to make sure of their love, if only
for the children's sake. Economic conditions being adequate, there is no
reason to suppose that real lovers will put off having children until
it is too late to obtain the best eugenic results. To paraphrase the
poet, we may say that those who restrain their desire for children do so
because their desire is weak enough to be restrained. Such people will
probably not make good parents. True lovers will beget children after a
year or two, nor will they mind making a few so-called sacrifices, as of
parties and new automobiles, for the sake of having children. They
recognize the distinction between entertainment and joy. Man may be a
laughing animal, but he is more essentially a creative animal. His
deepest pleasures are simply the by-products of his activity. In
building a home around a family of children both men and women often
find the deepest of all possible pleasures. And when it is in this
spirit of vital affection that the child is begotten, we get, as the
eugenists say, a vital fertilization. The chances are that children so
begotten will themselves be capable of strong, sound, deep-seated
feelings. As Dr. Kugelmass says in _Growing Superior Children_, "The
degree of emotional devotion of one parent to another is reflected
dominantly in the transmission of the more vital elements in the
constitution of the progeny."

To the question of physical readiness for childbirth I come last, but
not because it is of least importance. Without physical health the
parents cannot expect to bege