Furthermore, a New York paper [40] investigated the birth-rate in that
city with special reference to religious belief, and concluded that the
different bodies could be graded as follows with respect to the number of
children per marriage: (1) Jews, (2) Catholics, (3) Protestants (Orthodox),
(4) Protestants (Liberal), and (5) Agnostic. Professor Meyrick Booth, who
is himself a Protestant, concludes his survey of the evidence as follows:

"looking at the situation as a whole, there is good reason to think
that the Protestant Anglo-Saxons are not only losing ground
_relatively_, but must, at any rate in the East and middle East, be
suffering an actual decrease on a large scale. For it has been shown by
more than one sociologist (see, for example, the statement in _The
Family and the Nation_) that no stock can maintain itself with an
average of less than about four children per marriage, and from all
available data (it has not been found possible to obtain definite
figures for most of the Western and Southern States) we must see that
the average fertility of each marriage in this section of the American
people falls far short of the requisite four children. Judging by all
the figures at hand, the modern Anglo-Saxon American, with his high
standard of comfort, his intensely individualistic outlook on life, and
his intellectual and emancipated but child-refusing wife, is being
gradually thrust aside by the upgrowth of new masses of people of
simpler tastes and hardier and more natural habits. And, what is of
peculiar interest to us, this new population will carry into ascendancy
those religious and moral beliefs which have moulded its type of life.

"The victory will be, not to those religious beliefs which most closely
correspond to certain requirements of the abstract intellect, but to
those which give rise, in practice, to a mode of life that is simple,
natural, unselfish, and adequately prolific--in other words, to a mode