The social status of one class exerts an attractive force on the class next below.
But, apart from the influence of status, one class keeps steadily in view, and persistently strives to attain, the ease, comfort, and even luxury of the class above it.
Because the members of different grades are so migratory, there are many in one class known well to members in some class or classes below, and the ease and luxury which the former enjoy are a constant demonstration of what is possible to all.
Many who do not acquire wealth enough to make any appreciable difference in their social status, are able, through family, to improve their position.

Their sons and daughters are given an University education, and by far the largest number of those entering the learned professions in New Zealand are the sons of farmers, tradespeople, and retail dealers.
The great mass of the people in our Colony are conscious of the fact that their social relations and standard of comfort, or shall one say standard of ease, are capable of improvement, and the desire to bring about that improvement is the dominant ambition of their lives.
Anything that stands in the way of this ambition must be overcome.

A large family is a serious check to this ambition, so a large family must be avoided.
This desire to rise, and this dread too of incurring a responsibility that will assuredly check individual progress were counselled by Malthus, and resulted, and he said should result, in delayed marriage, lest a man, in taking to himself a wife, take also to himself a family he is unable to support.
But if this man can take to himself a wife without taking to himself a family, what then?
Men and women, in this Colony at least, have discovered that conformity to physiological law makes this possible.
A wife does not really add very much to a man's responsibility--it is the family that adds to his expense, and taxes all his resources.

It is the doctor and the nurse, the food and the clothing, and the education of the uninvited ones to his home, that use up all his earnings, that keep him poor, or make him poorer.
Then there is one aspect of the question peculiar to the women themselves.

Women have come to dread maternity.