For such reasons ambitious rising men fear marriage, and the possibility of large families. In many cases marriage is never contracted, and the middle and upper classes are full of men and women living single lives, without contributing their share to the production of the race. The lower classes, less hampered by a sense of prudence, contract marriages most freely, increasing thereby the relative fertility of their class. While the success of a woman in the upper classes who has several daughters to dispose of is proverbially precarious, we read that in the East End of London every girl in the lowest classes can get married, and with hardly one exception does marry.[28] Those in the upper classes who marry at all do so, as already remarked, at a later period. In verification of this fact we have not only the statements previously adduced from the circumstances of every-day experience, but we also have statistical information at hand in the Forty-Ninth Report on Births, Deaths, and Marriages, where we can find the average age of marriage given for a variety of trades and occupations as follows:-- AVERAGE AGES AT MARRIAGE, 1884–85. --------------------------------------------- Occupations. Bachelors. Spinsters. --------------------------------------------- Miners 24·06 22·46 Textile hands 24·38 23·43 Shoemakers, tailors 24·92 24·31 Artisans 25·35 23·70 Labourers 25·56 23·66 Commercial clerks 26·25 24·43 Shopkeepers, shopmen 26·67 24·22 Farmers and sons 29·23 26·91 Professional and } independent class } 31·22 26·40 --------------------------------------------- We shall see from a study of this table that marriage is contracted at a more advanced age by those who occupy what in the world’s estimation are high positions, and this implies diminished fertility on the part of the women. We should expect from common observation that the younger women would be more prolific, and this is borne out by exact statistical observation. Matthews Duncan[29] concludes that women who marry from twenty to twenty-four are the most prolific, and that the only period which at all rivals this is the five years from fifteen to nineteen inclusive, and that women married later in life than twenty-four are distinctly less prolific. _Lower Class Marriages are the Most Prolific._