but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio.  I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity.  Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase.  A village is honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its residents.  The drunkards and the paupers and the thieves and the idiots rather diminish than increase its respectability.  It seems to me that the world would be greatly benefited by thinning out.  Most of the places that I have seen would be much improved by being decimated, not to say quinqueted or bisected.  If people are stubborn and rebellious, stiff-necked and uncircumcised, in heart and ears, the fewer of them the better.  A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality of culture and breadth of view, to self-reliance and self-respect, is a thousand times better than an overcrowded one with everything at loose ends.  As with the village, so with the family.  There ought to be no more children than can be healthily and thoroughly reared, as regards the moral, physical, and intellectual nature both of themselves and their parents.  All beyond this is wrong and disastrous.  I know of no greater crime, than to give life to souls, and then degrade them, or suffer them to be degraded.  Children are the poor man’s blessing and Cornelia’s jewels, just so long as Cornelia and the poor man can make adequate provision for them.  But the ragged, filthy, squalid, unearthly little wretches that wallow before the poor man’s shanty-door are the poor man’s shame and curse.  The sickly, sallow, sorrowful little ones, shadowed too early by life’s cares, are something other than a blessing.  When Cornelia finds her children too many for her, when her step trembles and her cheek fades, when the sparkle flats out of her wine of life and her salt has lost its savor, her jewels are Tarpeian jewels.  One child educated by healthy and happy parents is better than seven dragging their mother into the grave, notwithstanding the unmeasured reprobation of our little book.  Of course, if they can stand seven, very well.  Seven and seventy times seven, if you like, only let them be buds, not blights.  If we obeyed the laws of God, children would be like spring blossoms.  They would impart as much freshness and strength as they abstract.  They are a natural institution, and Nature is eminently healthy.  But when they “come crowding into the home-nest,” as our book daintily says, they are a nuisance.  God never meant the home-nest to be crowded.  There is room enough and elbow-room enough in this world for everything that ought to be in it.  The moment there is crowding, you may be sure something wrong is going on.  Either a bad thing is happening, or too much of a good thing, which counts up just the same.  The parents begin to repair the evil by a greater one.  They attempt to patch their own rents by dilapidating their children.  They recruit their own exhausted energies by laying hold