As their families live in
want and are often diseased, they create the chief social problems of
the day. They bring children into the world as fast as women can bear
them. With each child they increase their own misery and provide
another worker to force down wages and prolong hours, through
competition for employment.
This has been the way of labor from the beginning. It is labor's way
in every country.
Having discovered that there is no relief in legislation, labor
organizes to limit its numbers in certain trades. Meanwhile the women
of the working class go on breeding more workers to wipe out in the
future the advantages gained for the present. In Paris, for instance,
the proletarian quarters of the city show a birth rate more than three
times as high as the birth rate in the well-to-do sections.
"Dr. Jacques Bartillon furnishes us with statistics which prove that
the birth rate in any quarter of Paris is in inverse ratio to its
degree of affluence," says G. Hardy in _How to Prevent Pregnancy_.
"The rich Champs-Elysees has a birth rate a third of that Bellerville
or of the Buttes-Chaumont. From 1,000 women from the age of fifteen to
fifty, Menimontant gives 116 births; the Champs-Elysees thirty-four
births.
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