ID# 1309:
"The New Family and Race Improvement," by W.A. Plecker, Virginia Health Bulletin (vol.17:12)
Date:
1925
Pages: (1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14|15|16)
Source:
University of Albany, SUNY, Estabrook, SPE,XMS 80.9 Bx 1 folder1-39

&quote;The New Family and Race Improvement,&quote; by W.A. Plecker, Virginia Health Bulletin (vol.17:12)

[left side] The proud Roman citizens who constituted the upper class, therefore, delegated the rearing of children, future laborers and soldiers, to a special class, whom they designated as the proletariat or child-bearers. Juvenal foresaw the ruin to which the vile practices then universal amongst the ruling and wealthy classes were dragging the Empire, and in one of his sharp satires he says: "Yet these, though poor, the pain of childbed bear, And, without nurses, their own infants rear. You seldom hear of the rich mantle spread For the babe, born in the great lady's bed. Such is the pow'r of herbs; such arts they use To make them barren, or their fruit to lose." - Dryden's Juvenal. Tacitus describes the superior family conditions of the German barbarians and compared the large families of those people, faithful to their marriage vows, with the lax marital conditions, and what we today designate as criminal practice, of the Romans. He says of the Germans: "The marriage tie with them is strict: you will find nothing in their character to praise more highly. Their life is one of fenced-in chastity. There is no arena with its seductions, no dinner-tables with their provocations to corrupt them - no one laughs at vice there; no one seduction, suffered or wrought, the spirit of the age. To limit the number of their children, to make away with any of the later children, is held abominable, and good habits have more force with them than good laws elsewhere. "There, then, they are, the children, in every house, filling out amid nakedness and squalor into that girth of limb and frame which is to our people a marvel. Its own mother suckles each at her breast; they are not passed on to the nursemaids and wet-nurses." - Translation of M. Hutton, Putnams Sons, New York. [8] [right side] Is there any wonder that these ancient progenitors of our race, possessing numbers and courage, but without the war equipment and training of Rome, were able to overthrow that great military power? This was simply the case of a people of good hereditary endowments, a wholesome family life, and living close to nature, being matched against those of the opposite characteristics, and winning. We come now to the consideration of the changed conditions which have arisen during the past generation, more marked in our cities, and in some of the States of our country, overrun with the great immigration of recent years. The situation is that the people of means, education and culture, forsaking the custom of their parents and grandparents, are no longer raising families of four or more children, two to make up for their own places and two to make up for those who either never marry, or if they do have no children or perhaps only one or two. The cities are most harmfully affected by this change of custom, as may be easily demonstrated by anyone who will ever run over in his mind the families of his neighbors and friends of the well-to-do and higher circles. The white people of the rural sections have not yet reached the same state of decline, except in those counties with an excess of negro population. In such counties conditions are similar to those existing amongst the original American stock in the New England and other northern States containing a large per cent of recent immigrants of a different type. As an illustration it has been found that in the sixth ward of Pittsburgh, composed almost wholly of foreigners, twenty per cent of the men being illiterate, the birthrate is three times that of the seventh ward, occupied by the old well-to-do American families: The result is that the cities are to-day depending upon the best immigration from the rural sections for their leaders. If you should take the country people away from most cities many of the churches, banks, and large [end]

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