Instead of being the happy, competent
father, supporting one or two children as they should be supported, he
is the frantic struggler against the burden of five or six, with the
tragic prospect of several more. The ranks of the physically weakened,
mentally dejected and spiritually hopeless young fathers of large
families attest all too strongly the immorality of the system.
If its effects upon the mother and the wage-earning father were not
enough to condemn the large family as an institution, its effects upon
the child would make the case against it conclusive. In the United
States, some 300,000 children under one year of age die each twelve
months. Approximately ninety per cent of these deaths are directly or
indirectly due to malnutrition, to other diseased conditions resulting
from poverty, or to excessive childbearing by the mother.
The direct relationship between the size of the wage-earner's family
and the death of children less than one year old has been revealed by
a number of studies of the infant death rate. One of the clearest of
these was that made by Arthur Geissler among miners and cited by Dr.
Alfred Ploetz before the First International Eugenic Congress.
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