Small Families v. Large

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 388, 23 June 1928, Page 23

Small Families v. Large

MANY FAMOUS MEN WOULD NOT HAVE SERVED THE WORLD HAD FAMILIES ALWAYS BEEN LIMITED

ANTHONY M. LUDOVICI, i his new book, has an interestic chapter in which he shows that man famous men and women would nt have been born if families in the day had been confined to two or thre

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH was an eighth child.

children, that almost universal custom of the educated classes to-day. Mr. Ludovici writes: “It is of the utmost importance from the standpoint of the welfare of any race or nation that heredity should be given as many chances as are reasonably possible to achieve the best and happiest combination. “In a small family the chances are few, and the likelihood of the best possible child of which the parental and stock qualities are capable of being produced is therefore necessarily

more remote than in a large family. And the consequence is that small families, by staking everything on the earliest three or four children —not to mention those of only one or two children —must be the cause every year of a very heavy loss in the best possible product of which each couple is capable. "The following people who came late in their families were not only more distinguished than any of the same family who preceded them, but would also never have seen the light if the birth-controller’s rule of four children to each couple had been adopted by their parents: Edward Lear, the youngest of 21 children. Charles Wesley (eighteenth). Sir Thomas Lawrence (sixteenth) . John Wesley (fifteenth). Albert Moore, the painter (fourteenth). Sir Richard Arkwright (inventor ; of cotton spinning machine), Josiah Wedgwod, and Pierre Prud'hon, famous French artist (thirteenth). Sir John Franklin, the Artie explorer (twelfth). Thomas Campbell (poet), Charles Reade (novelist) were eleventh children. Benjamin Franklin (U.S. author and statesman). John Hunter (physiologist and surgeon), and Coleridge were tenth children. Sir Walter Scott, Archbishop Richard Whately, Gainsborough, Archbishop A. C. Tait, Lord Cromer, Henry Moore (painter), and Granville Sharpe were ninth sons. Johann Sebastian Bach was an eighth child, and seventh children included Herrick, Mungo Park, Van Dyck, Huxley, Jane Austen, Grace Darling, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Emily Bronte, Darwin, De Quincey, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Pepys, Voltaire, Oliver Goldsmith, Oliver Cromwell, Sir Walter Besant, Rembrandt, Cecil Rhodes and Horace Walpole were fifth children. “The above lists,” adds Mr. Ludovici,' “which are by no means exhaustive and were merely compiled at random, are significant enough.” There are other weighty arguments in his hook on this vexed question.