Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 39, Number 77, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 May 1907 — Race Suicide Stir. Roosevelt. [ARTICLE]

Race Suicide Stirs Roosevelt.

An article in a recent number of the Review of Review [illegible] "The Doctor in the Public School," upholdlng small families, has drawn from President Roosevelt a letter to Dr. Shaw, editor of the Review of Reviews, protesting against such teaching. Dr. Cronin makes the statement that physical defects go hand in hand with large families, whether of the rich or of the poor, but this the president says is not true. In proof of his position the president points out the fact that athletes are most apt to be found in fair-sized families, and he points to the vital statistics of Massachusetts showing that the average American family has so few children that the birth rate has fallen below the death rate. He reiterates his belief that the tendency of well-to-do families to die out means the elimination instead of the survival of the fittest, and he declares that our country could not continue to exist if it paid heed to the expressed or implied teachings of such articles, which furnish excuse for every unnatural prevention of child bearing, and for every form of gross and shallow selfishness in American social life.