prominently in controlling the growth of
population and the increase of capital. The rich maintain the status
of the family by means of invested wealth, the poor do it by
education, and members of the middle class do it by a combination of
the two.

_Status maintained by Education._--In case of wage earners the need of
educating children and the advantages that flow from it overbalance
the need of bequeathing to them property; and yet the need of
bequeathing property of some kind is a powerful motive also. It is
important to enable them to procure the tools of some handicraft, or
to secure themselves against dangers from sickness or accident.
Moreover, it is not altogether technical education which counts in
this way. Culture in itself is a means, not only of direct enjoyment,
but of maintaining a social rank. The well-informed person
accomplishes directly what a well-to-do person accomplishes
indirectly, in that he gets direct pleasures from life which other
people cannot get, and he enjoys consideration of others and has
influence with them as an uninformed person cannot. The need,
therefore, of educating children for the sake of making them good
producers and the need of doing it for the purpose of making them good
consumers and of enabling them to make the most of what they produce
works against too rapid an increase of numbers.

_The Effect of Factory Legislation._--These motives are powerfully
strengthened when they are reenforced by public opinion and positive
law. The ambition of workers to secure laws which will forbid the
employment of children under the age of sixteen is, in this view, a
reasonable wish and one that if carried out would tend to promote the
welfare of future generations. It is doubtless true that this is not
the sole motive, and some weight must be accorded to the desire to
reduce the amount of available labor, and to protect adults who tend
machines from the competition of children who could do it as well or
better. There is, however, an undefined feeling in the laborers'
minds that when children all work from an early age the wages of the
whole family somehow become low, and that it takes all of them to do
for the family what the parents might do under a different condition.
The Malthusian law shows how, in the long run, this is brought about.
The increased strength of the demand for factory laws and compulsory
education is a positive proof of the growth of the motives which put a
check