To miss all this and live a barren life and a loveless old age. Perhaps to bear a child, that, for the need of the educative, elevating companionship of family mates is consumed by self, inheriting that vicious selfishness, which he by his birth defeated, and finding all the forces of nature focussed on his defect, like a pack of hounds that turn and rend an injured mate. Or a family of one, after years of parental care and love, education and expense, dies or turns a rake, and the canker of remorse takes his place in the broken hearts. Nature's laws are not broken with impunity--as a great Physician has said, "She never forgives and never forgets." Self-preservation and race-preservation together constitute the law of life, just as Conservation of Matter and Conservation of Energy constitute the Law of Substance in Haeckels Monistic Philosophy, and the severest altruism will permit man to follow his highest self-interest in obedience to these laws. It is only a perverted and vicious self-interest that would tempt him to infraction. That the vice of oliganthropy is growing amongst normal and healthy people is a painful and startling fact. In New Zealand the prevailing belief is that a number of children adds to the cares and responsibilities of life more than they add to its joys and pleasures, and many have come to think with John Stuart Mill, that a large family should be looked on with the same contempt as drunkenness. CHAPTER VII. WHO PREVENT. _Desire for family limitation result of our social system._--_Desire and practice not uniform through all classes._--_The best limit, the worst do not._--_Early marriages and large families._--_N.Z. marriage rates. Those who delay, and those who abstain from marriage._--_Good motives mostly actuate._--_All limitation implies restraint._--_Birth-rates vary inversely with prudence and self-control._--_The limited family usually born in early married life when progeny is less likely to be well developed._--_Our worst citizens most prolific._--_Effect of poverty on fecundity._--_Effect of alcoholic intemperance._--_Effect of mental and physical defects._--_Defectives propagate their kind._--_The intermittent inhabitants of Asylums and Gaols constitute the greatest danger to society._--_Character the resultant of two forces--motor impulse and inhibition._--_Chief criminal characteristic is defective inhibition._--_This defect is strongly hereditary._--_It expresses itself in unrestrained fertility._ It has been sufficiently demonstrated in preceding chapters, that the birth-rate has been, and is still rapidly declining. It has been sought to prove that this decline is chiefly due to voluntary means taken by married people to limit their families, and that the desire for this limitation is the result of our social system. The important question now arises. Is the desire uniform through all classes of Society, and is the practice of prevention uniform through all classes?