Say what you will of environmental factors in success or failure, there is no reasonable doubt that differences of natural capacity also enter. Under like conditions one individual, because of inherent energy and intelligence, may emerge from misery, while another, lacking these traits, remains in it. And it is quite possible that the same traits may lead the former on to a successful and well-ordered life, including the raising of a normal family, while the latter remains unprolific. It is not true, so far as I can judge from antecedent probability, or from the evidence, that those who fall below the misery line have, as a class, as large a natural increase as those who rise somewhat above it. A steady young man who can earn good wages, a competent housewifely girl, are types favored in marriage, and likely to rear families. And those who “do well” are also less devitalized by exhaustion, discouragement, and dissipation. They make good their place in the intermediate class, have more children and bring a larger proportion of them to maturity than they would if they had failed. The small families of the rich have led many to overlook the fact that among less prosperous people success and fecundity are in some degree connected. I know the common impression regarding the large families of the shiftless and degenerate and admit that they are often abnormally large. I think, however, the impression is on the whole exaggerated, perhaps because of our feeling that such families ought to have no children at all. A standard work dealing with poverty in America remarks that “the families of paupers or semi-paupers usually average smaller than those of the population as a whole, partly because the number among classes degenerate enough to be dependent is not so large as ordinarily supposed, partly because of a high infant mortality, and partly because the families of these classes tend to disintegrate rapidly.”[59] Admitting what exceptions you please, I have little doubt that this will hold true on the whole. Of dissipation we may say much the same as of economic failure; heredity is certainly a factor in it, however subordinate to environment, and the dissipated are, without doubt, a comparatively unprolific class. Vice, alcoholism, and irregularity of all kinds tend to diminish fecundity. The sterility due to venereal disease alone is enormous, though not confined, unfortunately, to the licentious themselves, but extending to their wives and children, and to whomever else they may contaminate. Alcoholism leads to sexual vice, and also lowers intelligence and vitality. It is true that drunkards often have large families, but for one such case you will find perhaps four of those who have formed no stable marriage relation. It is a mere truism to say that, as a rule, dissipation means a kind of life inconsistent with the raising of a normal family.