All such cases of college graduates cited as especially deplorable declines in birth-rate are based on the assumption that these individuals are a particularly superior stock.[19] But one might question this premise as a generalization. It may or may not be true. Are they superior or have they had mainly a combination of luck and incentive, luck in that their parents had sufficient means, acquired possibly through their own superiority, possibly not, to send them to college, and incentive derived from a fortunate environment which awakened a desire in them--or in their parents for them--for college education? Is the woolly-witted son of opulence, so abundant in our colleges to-day, who is boosted through by hook or by crook, of superior eugenical value to the alert eager boy--and his name is legion--destined for economic reasons to go to work at or before the completion of his high-school course, perhaps because of the very fact of an unlimited fecundity in his own family which necessitates his help for the general support? When one first learns of the declining birth-rate among college women and men he feels appalled, but immediately the question flashes up, if this is _the_ superior stock, and up to date it has died out or is dying out rapidly, whence then this ever augmenting rush of young folk who fairly deluge our universities and colleges to-day? Does it not rather point to the fact that in our own country at least, the man who will and can take a college education successfully is not so much the product of breeding from college men, but of a prosperity which leaves a sufficient surplus in the family exchequer to enable sons and daughters to go to college, and is it not reasonable to suppose that there is yet an abundant stock back of these who similarly await but the golden touch of opportunity? When we consider such men as Carlyle, Lincoln and a host of others who were not the sons of collegians, although we may be university pedigreed ourselves we can not but feel doubtful of the validity of a premise which takes a college stock unqualifiedly as having any considerable monopoly of innate superiority. After all, college can mean little more than opportunity, and the obtaining of such opportunity in this world of economic maladjustments and accidents of social position is too largely a matter of chance, at least in America, to stamp the possessors of these advantages, on this criterion alone, as of inborn superiority. Undoubtedly much that is intrinsically good now slumbers in the lower strata of society because of lack of favorable environment to call forth the latent possibilities.