days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."

The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen
wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They
also filled the churchyards.

_Twenty-one of those seventy-one children died in childhood._

This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving
children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only
2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.

In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the
unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to
help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young
wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous
frequency with which it killed them.

Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to
1745.

The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and
were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as
fourteen.

May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious
sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken
because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap
kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs
and spinning wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by
somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other
necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was
domestic.

Our young engineering friend, John, when _he_ looked forward to _his_
future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at
all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little
real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a
home.

Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of
mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On
the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he
was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.

The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil
(complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:

Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to
1745, there were:

Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;

Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;

Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five y