Morrow, in his _Social Diseases and Marriage_, 75 per cent of the
young men in the United States become impure before marriage. This
serves to disseminate venereal diseases among the general population,
especially among innocent women and children. The consequence is, on the
one hand, a considerable number of sterile marriages and on the other
hand a high infant mortality. It need not be assumed, as we have already
said, that vice is more prevalent to-day than in previous generations,
but on account of the conditions of our social life diseases which
accompany vice are now more widely disseminated than they have been at
any time in our previous history; therefore, even the physical results
of vice are different to-day than they were a generation or more ago.

(4) Education has been alleged as a cause of decreasing birth rate in
the native white American stock. This, however, is true only in a very
qualified sense. While it is a fact, as collected statistics have shown,
that if Harvard and other universities depended on children of their
alumni for students their attendance would actually decrease in numbers,
it is not true that college graduates have had a lower birth rate than
the economic and social classes to which they belong. So far as
statistics have been collected, indeed, they seem to indicate that the
wealthy uneducated are producing fewer children than the educated
classes who associate with them. The influence decreasing the birth rate
among the educated is, therefore, not education itself, but the high
standards of living and the luxury of the classes with whom they
associate.

On the other hand, the higher education of women seems to be, down to
the present time, operating as a distinct influence to lessen the birth
rate among the educated classes for the reason that apparently a
majority of educated women do not marry. The higher education has not