FAMOUS PEOPLE AND BIG FAMILIES

Evening Star, Issue 19894, 16 June 1928, Page 18

FAMOUS PEOPLE AND BIG FAMILIES

Mr Anthony M. Ludoviei, in his book ‘ Tlie Night-Hoers, or the _ Case •Against Birth Control,’ has an interesting chapter in which lie shows that manv famous men and women would not have been horn if families in their day had been confined to two or three children, that almost universal custom of the educated classes to-day. Mr Ludoviei writes: — “It is of the utmost importance, from the standpoint of tho 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 lour children —not to mention those of only one or two children—must bo the cause every year <>f a very heavy loss in tho best_possil> product of which each couple is capsule. “ The following people who came late in their families were not only more distinguished than any of the .-tune family who preceded them, but would also never havo 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 twenty-one 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 Wedgwood, and Pierre Prud-hon, famous French artist (thirteenth). Sir John Franklin, tho Arctic explorer (twelfth). Tliomas Campbell (poet), Charles Roado (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 Whatcly, Gainsborough, Archbishop A. C. Tait, Lord Cromer, Henry Moore (painter), and Granville Sharpe were ninth sens. 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, Do 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 Luaovici, “which are by no means exhaustive and were merely compiled at random, are significant enough.”