Arthur Baker's Insurgency

SOURCE: Advert, Amerika Esperantisto, vol. 9, no. 1, February 1911, p. 30.

Dr. Eliot on the Family

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I observe that you publish, under Boston date line, an interview with Dr. Eliot, in which he recommends that every family have six children. Will you kindly get Dr. Eliot to explain where he would put the fourteenth generation, since the thirteenth generation would be standing three deep on each other's shoulders, crowding every foot of dry land on the globe, the number bordering on a dizzy total of quintillions? One quintillion looks like this: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Ajax defying the lightning is a tame hero compared with Dr. Eliot defying the multiplication table. On the same subject this magazine, February issue, says:

That if we surround the worker with conditions in which his birth rate is higher than is justified by his wages; if we allow him pay enough to nourish two healthy children and he insists upon attempting to rear six, with the result that three of them inevitably die. . . . Society, if it admits its inability to change these conditions, should quietly and painlessly destroy the three children which social conditions have doomed, in order that the full value of nourishment, attention, and training may go into the other three and make them more efficient members of society.

I am not advocating murder, but rather a wholesale respect for mathematical laws and a decent adjustment of the size of families to the cost of living.

ARTHUR BAKER,
Editor Insurgency, Chicago.

New York, Feb. 14, 1911.

SOURCE: Baker, Arthur. “Dr. Eliot on the Family” [letter to the editor], The New York Times, Saturday, February 18, 1911.

Esperanto, Vaŝingtono, & la Mondo / Esperanto, Washington, & the World — 1910
Centjara Jubileo / Centennial — 2010

Esperanto Study Guide / Esperanto-Gvidilo