Children of Poor Often Make Valuable Adults, Says Dearborn Independent, Dec. 23, 1925

Should the Poor Have Children?

Dearborn Independent

The very interesting president of the University of Michigan as reported in the press favors among other things, the decrease of children in the families of the poor. He says that in other families the deliberate limitation of offspring is already practiced. It is not a new proposal, but somehow it fails to lose, even with excessive repetition, its power to nauseate the reason. It is always the poor! Yet nobody defines the poor. The poor are those who live in the back streets. But the boys raised in the front street, 15 years hence, and the girls ae likely to be the wives and mothers of a race virile enough to save the country from the shrinkage in morals and energy that will come upon it through “limited families.” For selfishness is the great immorality.

Where are the poor? And what have the other classes, who can give their children “all the advantages,” to promise for tomorrow? The poor of yesterday are in the seats of power today, and the families of yesterday that “had all the advantages” are going to seed. It may be something in a boy’s favor that he has to go to work at 15 (if the Constitution of the United States continues to permit him that much liberty) and thus escapes the University, which more than any industrial system molds me down to robots. Forbidden all the “advantages” he may have a chance to make his way in life.

It may be possible one day to compel the poor to cease having children, but it is greatly to be hoped that no law will be proposed to compel the other classes to make up the deficiency. For the impression one gains from all this talk about limitation is that those who deliberately affect it are thereby conferring great benefit on the county. Those who can be brought into that camp do well by society in leaving no descendants. Meantime, the school of hard knocks will continue to have the most distinguished sons and daughters.

From page 3 of the Concord Daily Tribune, Wednesday, Dec. 23, 1925.

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