brought home the race-suicide of the native-born to every
American intelligence, but mere rhetoric will not in itself suffice to
make people, insecurely employed and struggling to maintain a
comfortable standard of life against great economic pressure, prolific.
Presented as a call to a particularly onerous and quite unpaid social
duty the appeal for unrestricted parentage fails. Husband and wife alike
dread an excessive burthen. Travel, leisure, freedom, comfort, property
and increased ability for business competition are the rewards of
abstinence from parentage, and even the disapproval of President
Roosevelt and the pride of offspring are insufficient counterweights to
these inducements. Large families disappear from the States, and more
and more couples are childless. Those who have children restrict their
number in order to afford those they have some reasonable advantage in
life. This, in the presence of the necessary knowledge, is as
practically inevitable a consequence of individualist competition and
the old American tradition as the appearance of slums and a class of
millionaires.

These facts go to the very root of the American problem. I have already
pointed out that, in spite of a colossal immigration, the population of
the United States was at the end of the nineteenth century over twenty
millions short of what it should have been through its own native
increase had the birth-rate of the opening of the century been
maintained. For a hundred years America has been "fed" by Europe. That
feeding process will not go on indefinitely. The immigration came in
waves as if reservoir after reservoir was tapped and exhausted. Nowadays
England, Scotland, Ireland, France and Scandinavia send hardly any more;
they have no more to send. Germany and Switzerland send only a few. The
South European and Austrian supply is not as abundant as it was. There
may come a time when Europe and Western Asia will have no more surplus
population to send, when even Eastern Asia will have passed into a less
fecund phase, and when America will have to look to its own natural
increase for the continued development of its resources.

If the present isolated family of private competition is still the
social unit, it seems improbable that there will be any greater natural
increase than there is in France.

Will the growing idea of a closer social organisation have developed by
that time to the possibility of some collective effort in this