282 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
larger and better-managed works have recognized the unwisdom of treating their employees rather worse than their machines, and have instituted social and other agencies for the amelioration of the life of the workers. In these cases the agencies are on the same lines as those found in Germany. Systems of profit-sharing and other schemes for the social and educational advancement of the workers are excep- tional in English works and factories.
American methods : In the United States we find elaborate arrangements for obtaining the co-operation of the workers. In some few instances these take the form of social agencies, but in the majority of instances a bonus system, based on a high normal level of wages, is employed, and every man is allowed free scope for individual effort and ability. The comparative feebleness of trade-unionism in the States has undoubtedly facilitated the introduction of this system of allowing each man a free hand, and of paying him exactly what he can earn. Whether the conditions which have favored its introduction will continue is doubtful in view of the spread of militant unionism in the States.
On account of the widespread adoption of bonus and premium systems of pay- ment in the United States, there is considerably less activity in the promotion of social schemes and agencies for the benefit of workers than in England and Germany. The details of the organization of such workers as the National Cash Register Co., of Dayton, O., which maintains a number of social and educational agencies for the benefit of its workpeople, and the pickle factory of H. J. Heinz & Co., at Pittsburg, with its baths and concert and dining halls for the entertainment of workers, show that America is not without examples of enlightened treatment of work people, apart from pecuniary rewards of labor. J. B. C. KERSHAW, in Engineering Magazine for June. A. B.
Decrease in the Size of American Families. The failure of the Har- vard students to produce their share of the present generation is but a single example of a widespread condition. Statistics of Middlebury, Wesleyan, and New York Uni- versities show that the students of those institutions also multiply at a diminishing rate.
The most plausible explanation is that of conscious restriction of offspring. Greater prudence, higher ideals of education, more interest in the health of women, interests of women in affairs outside of the home, the increased knowledge of certain fields of physiology and medicine, a decline in the religious sense of the impiety of interference with things in general, the longing for freedom from household cares any and all of these may be assigned as the motive for the restriction. The only other explanation is the physiological infertility of the social, and perhaps of the racial, group to which college men and their wives belong.
It is possible to do more than speculate about the relative shares of unwillingness and incapacity. The figures themselves tell a plain story to the student who examines them in the light of recent knowledge of the variability of physical traits.
In the case of artificial restriction, there would appear in the statistics an increase in the number of small families and a porportionate decrease in large families, whereas in cases of diminished reproductive capacity, there would appear in the statistics a falling off in the size of all families, and not an increase of small families and a decrease of large ones. As a matter of fact, the statistics show a general decline in the size of all families, and point to the conclusion that the decrease is due to incapacity rather than voluntary restriction.
So far as our general mental prepossessions go, a real decrease in fertility seems at first sight a preposterous doctrine. One can well imagine the sneer of the physician whose experience emphasizes the frequency of restriction, and the pitying smile of the biologist who discerns that a progressive decrease in fertility of a species is a flat contradiction of the doctrine of natural selection. " Play on with your statistical hair-splitting," they would say, "nothing that you find will disturb our beliefs. We know better."
But the experiences of metropolitan physicians will not serve to prophecy the social psychology of the species we have studied. Their opinions may be as wide of the mark as the common belief that unwillingness is the main cause of the failure of the women of the better classes to nurse their children. As to the contradiction of natural
