than they could afford to educate in the best possible way. This meant at least a college education, and frequently has led to one and two-child families. It is a motive of birth control which calls for condemnation. The old idea of valuable mental discipline for all kinds of mental work to be gained from protracted difficult formal education is now rejected by educational psychologists, but its prevalence in the popular mind serves to make "higher education" still something of a fetish, from which marvelous results, not capable of precise comprehension, are anticipated. We do not disparage the value of a college education, in saying that parents should not attach such importance to it as to lead them to limit their family to the number to whom they can give 20 years of education without pecuniary
The effect of these various factors in the increasing cost of children is to decrease fecundity not so much on the basis of income of parents, as on the basis of their standards. The prudent, conscientious parent is therefore the one most affected, and the reduction in births is greatest in that class, where eugenics is most loth to see it.
The remedy appears to be a change in public opinion which will result in a truer idea of values. Some readjustments in family budgets are called for, which will discriminate more clearly between expenditure that is worth while, and that which is not. Without depriving his children of the best medical attention and education, one may eliminate those invidious sources of expense which benefit neither the children nor anyone else,—overdressing, for instance. A simplification of life would not only enable superior people to have larger families, but would often be an advantage to the children already born.
On the other hand, the fact that higher