CHAPTER VII.
WHO PREVENT.
_Desire for family limitation result of our social system._--_Desire and practice not uniform through all classes._--_The best limit, the worst do not._--_Early marriages and large families._--_N.Z.

marriage rates.
Those who delay, and those who abstain from marriage._--_Good motives mostly actuate._--_All limitation implies restraint._--_Birth-rates vary inversely with prudence and self-control._--_The limited family usually born in early married life when progeny is less likely to be well developed._--_Our worst citizens most prolific._--_Effect of poverty on fecundity._--_Effect of alcoholic intemperance._--_Effect of mental and physical defects._--_Defectives propagate their kind._--_The intermittent inhabitants of Asylums and Gaols constitute the greatest danger to society._--_Character the resultant of two forces--motor impulse and inhibition._--_Chief criminal characteristic is defective inhibition._--_This defect is strongly hereditary._--_It expresses itself in unrestrained fertility._ It has been sufficiently demonstrated in preceding chapters, that the birth-rate has been, and is still rapidly declining.

It has been sought to prove that this decline is chiefly due to voluntary means taken by married people to limit their families, and that the desire for this limitation is the result of our social system.
The important question now arises.

Is the desire uniform through all classes of Society, and is the practice of prevention uniform through all classes?
In other words, is the decline in the birth-rate due to prevention in one class more than in another, and if so which?
Experience and statistics force us to the startling conclusion, that the birth-rate is declining amongst the best classes of citizens, and remains undisturbed amongst the worst.
Now the first-class responsible for the decline includes those who do not marry, and those who marry late.

The Michigan vital statistics for 1894 (p.