Another consequence of the increasing strain is “race suicide”; which is simply a popular term for that “elimination of the middle class” which Karl Marx predicted half a century ago. The homilies of President Roosevelt may have caused a few more superfluous bourgeois babies to be born; but I rather fancy that in general it has been a case of “everybody’s business and nobody’s business”—that the average middle-class American has no idea of lowering his standard of living for the purpose of affecting the census returns. As a result of a confidential census of “race suicide,” taken in England and reported in the _Popular Science Monthly_, Mr. Sidney Webb found that the offspring had been voluntarily limited in two hundred and twenty-four cases out of a total of two hundred and fifty-two marriages; and out of the one hundred and twenty-eight cases in which the causes of limitation were given, economic causes were specified in seventy-three. Similar results would certainly follow an inquiry in this country; in fact Americans of refinement have come to have an instinctive feeling of repugnance to a large family; to have six or seven children is vulgar and “common,” and suggestive of foreigners. The reason is simply that conditions now prevail which make large families impossible, except to Poles and Hungarians and Italians and French-Canadians, people who are too ignorant to limit their offspring, and whose standards of life are close to animals—their children earning their own livings in sweatshops, mines and factories, as soon as they are able to walk.