The fact that it never operates widely while prosperity remains fairly equally distributed shows that the trouble of children is not the cause of their elimination. Doubtless a few frivolous, featherheaded women now think they are not having children because they detest the pain of bearing and the trouble of rearing them. These same women-feathery weather-hens as they are would equally with each other vie in producing, instead of preventing, progeny did the public sentiment of their class veer in that direction. To them the pain and trouble, even of Avernus, are as nothing compared with not being in the fashion. The sentiment against having children, in time, also permeates the richest class at the top. The growing absence of children has made society more frivolous and pleasure-loving. All are subject in some degree to public sentiment—even those who were most its makers. That it is their own Frankenstein does not alter its power over them. Without having to do so and without knowing why, the richest, also, soon cut down children in order to have the better time which other people are having and which the richest are financially, of all people, best able to enjoy.

People already among the poorest lack the spur of false shame which, in a society where wealth is the standard of merit, those feel who are getting poorer. The poorest never struggle so hard to get up as the poorer strain to keep from going down.

While ambition may excite the poorest, the element of injured pride is absent. The extent of the power of this latter element can be measured from the fact that the poorest seldom commit race suicide. They are already down and they know it. They feel no shame in remaining there. They have always been poor, and consequently feel no sense of personal blameworthiness because they are not rich. They would like to get up. They would like to accompany their friends who manage to rise. To that only ambition urges. To rise is success. To stay behind where they have always been is not failure. For them it is keeping up. Consequently, ambition or no ambition, they keep on having children. To those higher in the social scale children mean failure and consequently, with pride added to ambition's urge, they do not have them. To do so would not be keeping up. The poorest are happier with one fear less. Starvation they may dread but they fear not failure.

In a society where, as in ours, money became the standard of success, Professor Mahaffy thus recounts the process of race suicide:*

"And what was the remedy adopted by the middle classes to maintain themselves in comfort? An expedient not unknown in this country and for not very dissimilar reasons. It was the limitation of families, the avoidance of the duty and cost of bring

* His book consists of lectures delivered in the Peabody course at Boston and by "this country'' he refers to the United States.

ing up children, so that Polybius speaks of it as the signal feature of the Greece of his day-the strange barrenness that had come upon the once prolific inhabitants of the land. Such a misfortune can be avoided only when great immigration exists, and even then it results in replacing the old population, the cream of the country, by the scum gathered from abroad. There were no inducements for immigration into Greece, and so the country which was once teeming with population sunk into somnolence and decay.

"Could I offer you a clearer proof of the modern character of this civilization, which had not only a youth and an age of gold, but then a silver autumn or a Martinmas summer, when Plutarch lived in his little deserted town, surrounded by a complete and terrible decadence?" (pp. 206-7). Professor Mahaffy does more than prove Greek civilization modern. He proves modern civilization Greek by showing both to be monopolistic.

The learned author had earlier written: "There is no commoner phrase in the mouth of Greek revolutionists, or in the mouth of those that dreaded them, than 'Abolition of debts and redivision of the land.' Aristotle mentions these as the watchword of the mob-leaders" (p. 186). Yet Professor Mahaffy states that there is no record in Greek history of any such successful revolution and redivision.

As to Greece, the latest Roman historian, Ferrero,

in his famous Greatness and Decline of Rome, thus adds his testimony to that of Professor Mahaffy "When Greece was declared a Roman province in 146 B. C. the decadence of the whole country had already begun. Her territorial and maritime empire had gradually fallen away, her commercial supremacy had disappeared, her capital had been exhausted and her industries ruined, art and study were decaying, and the source of her former wealth had run dry" (Vol. V, p. 1).

"Celibacy and debt, the two great scourges of the ancient world, which constantly suffered from want of capital and diminished population even in the most prosperous epochs, had brought desolation even to the countryside" (V, 3).

"Unfortunately the poverty of Greece was not merely the result of circumstance; it was due to many moral vices, public and private; luxury, frivolity, moral degradation, the corruption of justice, a mixture of civic arrogance and civic indifference, the spirit of chicanery, the domination of a little minority of rich men and the servility of the numerous poor" (V, 6). The italics are ours.

This author, of historians the most modern and economic, conceives of Roman history, if not all history, as a constant submergence of an aristocracy by a rising democracy-in turn producing its own small aristocracy to be in turn destroyed by its own prosperity. If this be the true philosophy of his

tory under the present system, certainly it is operated by a sufficient cause. Whatever adds to that cause adds to chaos. Whatever takes away slacks the process and, if done at a time when a substantial middle class still exists, tends longer to preserve, and makes easier more fully to attain, conditions nearer those of the ideal state.

Monopoly's advocates may retort that, notwithstanding the rolling of peoples and civilizations into oblivion, the world has still progressed. It is true that we have advanced in most fields, certainly in the practical and mechanical though not the artistic, beyond the Greeks. We have no means of knowing how much farther than ourselves the Greeks by this time would have advanced in every field, had they not rendered further advance impossible in any by not advancing equally, or at least equally enough to retain a large middle class. If there is anything in training and heredity it would seem that uncounted generations of trained minds should have made greater progress than has been possible by constantly civilizing new races of savages-of whom we are among the latest but under the present system certain not to be the last. If the human material was equal at the start, untold æons have been lost in racial kindergartning. We have no reason to think the Greek beginnings inferior to ours. We have less reason to think our average intelligence yet equal to theirs of that age when, among Athenian citizens,