Children are Welcomed

French Parents Greet Them With Rapture, But Number Must Accord With Income.

With the birth of offspring there comes to the French father and mother not only a rapture ascribed by colder races to the emotional temperament of the Gaul, but an immediate sense of responsibility almost unknown in America, where the doors of opportunity for youth and manhood, as well as womanhood, are still open, with almost assured security beyond of a livelihood.

Although the coming of a child can be said, without fear of exaggeration, to be commonly accounted as the greatest blessing that can descend upon a French household, it is, nevertheless, a blessing that must not too often repeated. The Malthusian doctrine has become the utilitarian practice of the race. To France alone must we look to find the education of an entire nation —one limiting offspring to the gage of income. The joy in the possession of a child is unquestionably immeasurably enhanced by this process of selection, in point of numbers.

— From Anna Bowman Dodd's “The Education of French Children,” in The Century.