RACE SUICIDE IN COLLEGES

That the old New England stock is not perpetuating itself is no new fact. That the graduates of women's colleges do not bear their proportionate share in race production is no new fact. Yet it is new to learn that Harvard and Yale graduates the typical product of the best colleges of the United States, are producing only a little over half of the children necessary to perpetuate their type, and that this figure has been constantly on the decrease. J. C. Phillips '99, in the Graduates' Magazine, gives the data which prove these facts. His research covers the classes from 1853 to 1890, after which the figures are incomplete.

Mr. Phillips has found out that while the percentage of Harvard graduates marrying remained nearly constant at 75, the number of children born per married graduate dropped from 3.13 for the eight classes from 1853 to 1860 to 2.06 for the ten classes from 1881 to 1890. The percent of childless marriages rose from 7.8 in the first group to 23.4 in the last. For this second group the number of children per graduate stands at 1.55, and almost exactly the same figures are true for Yale.

With college graduate stock it has been calculated by experts that each family not childless must produce 3.7 children on an average in order barely to perpetuate the race. The actual number at Harvard is only 2.06. In other words Harvard graduates are the fathers of only 56 per cent, of the children necessary to continue their stock.

What are the causes of this pernicious weakness? Undoubtedly they are in part world-wide, for the decline in the birth-rate among Harvard men is paralleled by a like decline among the upper and middle classes in all civilized nations and especially in America. However, this does not exonerate college men; the guilt rests even more heavily upon those who have had opportunity to see the light.

One cause is inevitably fostered by our college life. Dr. Charles W. Eliot calls it "a preference on the part of both men and women for freedom from care and responsibility, and for passing pleasures rather than solid satisfaction." It cannot be denied that our indolent college life, with its short-cuts to pleasure, with the ease of spending an evening at the theatre or idling away an afternoon in chatter and smoke, is an open temptation to passing pleasures. We must be unusually strong if these wayside temptations do not lure us aside, leaving upon our characters the indelible imprint of a flabby character.

No superficial expedient will remedy this condition. We are only too prone to seek the immediate, only too averse to tracing the certain future results of our present acts. If we do not seek the permanent now, it will be at the cost of our future satisfaction. As Mr. Phillips says, "Reform must come from within, not from without, and it will be brought about by a sterner sense of duty and a realization that the vain stampede after pleasure for pleasure's sake is leading us only to restlessness and discontent."