It would seem that one of the primal causes for the decrease in the marriage rate is the ease with which vice has been allowed to become organized in this country into a regular system, which is conducted upon a basis of cold-blooded business calculation. The fact that we have between six hundred thousand and three-quarters of a million of prostitutes in America, and that this class of people is being recruited at the rate of over fifteen thousand per annum from foreign countries and about seventy-five thousand per annum from our own country, is certainly highly significant. Furthermore, the fact that probably three-quarters of the women in America who marry are forced to undergo major operations within the first five years of their married life, on account of the moral delinquency of their husbands, has certainly not given any impetus to marriage in our own country. We have also to remember that over one-third of all the blindness in this country is traceable to a like cause, and that this occurs in innocent children, who usually are less than a week old when their sight is lost, as the result of venereal infection. Furthermore, in many of the homes which we all have an opportunity to observe, there is not that happiness existing which would lead thinking people to rush ruthlessly into matrimony, and the necessity for making divorce easy and the marriage relationship hard to enter into was never as imperative as it is to-day. The majority of the children being born, and in whose hands the entire welfare of this state in the future will rest, are usually those of parents who are either unfitted or unable, physically, intellectually, and morally, to give them such character and education as will make them good citizens; in other words, vice and crime are breeding faster by far than moral restraint and virtue. Whenever we are able to have our young men understand that self-control on their part is a matter of first importance in the requirements of good citizenship, and a prime requisite if individual happiness is desired, then and only then will we begin to find marriage becoming more popular and divorce less to be desired by those who have entered into this relationship. CHAPTER VIII PROBLEMS OF THE FUTURE