children will cost
as much when the oldest child has reached that age as it will cost at
any later time. Even though one were added to the family every year or
two, one would graduate from the position of dependence every year or
two, and the number constantly on the father's hands for support would
probably not exceed five or six, however large the total number might
become. The large number of children in families of early New England
and the large number of them in French Canadian families at a recent
date were due to the fact that land was abundant, expenses were small,
and a boy of ten years working on the land could put into the family
store as much as his maintenance took out of it. The food problem was
not grave in those primitive places and times, and neither were the
problems of clothing, housing, and educating. It is in this last item
that the key to a change of the condition lay, for the time came when
more educating was required, when the burden of maintaining children
continued longer, and a condition of self-support was reached at no
such early date as it had been in rural colonies.

_The Effect of Endowing Children with Education and with
Property._--When children need to be thoroughly educated, the burden
of maintaining a family of course increases. An unduly large family
means the lowering of the present standard of living for all and a
lowering of the future standard for the children. With most workmen it
is not possible either to endow many children with property or to
educate them in an elaborate way. The fear, therefore, of losing
present comforts for the family as a whole and the fear of losing
caste by seeing the family drop, at a later date, into a lower social
class, are arguments against large families.

_Why Economic Progress perpetuates Itself._--The economic motive which
causes progress to perpetuate itself and to bring about more and more
progress is the determined resistence to a fall from a social status.
The family must not lose caste. It must not sacrifice any of the
absolute comforts to which it is accustomed, particularly when so
doing entails a degradation. Such is human nature that the
unwillingness to give up something to which one is accustomed is a far
stronger spur to action than the ambition to get something to which
one is not accustomed; and a social rank once attained is not
surrendered without a struggle. A tenacious maintenance of status is
the motive which figures most