Western Kansas world. [volume] (WaKeeney, Kan.) 1885-current, 1903-03-28
fire Too Wealthy
To Ha,e Children

In that section of New York where
wealth is the greatest, where mill
Honaires are many and fashion
reigns, the proportion of children is
less than one to each family. In that
section of the city where poverty
rules and people are herded together
like cattle the proportion of children
is three to each family.
In other words, the poor and Hitter
ate multiply three times as rapidly as
the rich and educated. Obviously
there is lesson here. Where luxury
and ease abound the race-the Ameri-
can race-scarcely reproduces itself
each generation, but in the humblest
tenement houses, most of them
homes of the foreigner barely able
to speak the English language and
utterly Indifferent to all the great
problems, except that greatest one of
feeding hungry mouths, the little
ones increase like the grains of corn
in the full ear.
The facts brought out by thor
ough investigation of conditions as
they exist at both extremes of the
social scale in this city-facts that
have a counterpart in all sections of
this country in mark
ed way the views entertained by
President Roosevelt. In a letter to
Mrs. John Van Worst, co-author of
1.-The Woman Who Tolls the Presi-
dent uttered a strong protest against
the love of luxury and ease which is
undermining the race supremacy of
the American nation by preventing
marriages and the production of large
families. Race suicide, whether com
plete or partial, the President holds,
is the greatest question before the
country and amounts to a serious
menace.
His views of the situation are ex-
pressed in these words:
can easy, good-natured kindness
and a desire to be independent-that
is, to live ones life purely according
to ones own deSires-are in no sense
substitutes for the fundamental vir-
tues, for the practice of the strong
racial qualities without which there
can be no strong race-the qualities
of courage and resolution both in
men and women, of scorn of what is
mean, base and selfish, of eager de-
sire or fight or suffer, as the case
may be, provided the end to be gained
is great enough, and the con-
temptuous putting aside of mere
ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere
avoidance of toll and worry.
"Of course no one quality makes
a good citizen, and no one quality
will save a nation But there are
certain great qualities for the lack
of which no amount of intellectual
btilliancy, or of material prosperity,
or of easiness of life can atone, and
which show decadence and corrup-
ton in the nation just as much as if
they are produced by selfshness and
coldness and ease-loving laziness
among comparatively poor people-as
if they are produced by vicious or
frivolous luxury in the rich
eff the men of the nation are not
anxious to work in many different
ways, with all their might and
strength, and ready and able to fight
at need, and anxious to be fathers of
families, and if the women do not
recognize that the greatest thing for
any woman is to be good wife and
mother, why, that nation has cause
to be alarmed about it's future.
''There is no physical trouble
among Americans. The trouble with
the situation you set forth is one of
character, and therefore we can con-
quer it if we only will
This in general terms is the
arraignment. Some figures have been
supplied by DR.. George F. Shrady,
who has made an extended study of
the subject. He found the average
family of the better or more educated
class consist of only one or two child
rem, the middle class family of from
four to five, while the families of the
lower classes run from five to nine.
This finding has been substantiated
in the present inquiry in the case of
the first and the last groups.
No section of New York contains