Character and maintaining poprulation

An easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to be independent, that is, to live one's life purely according to one's won desires, are in no sense substitutes for the fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong racial qualities without which there can be no strong races--the qualities of courage and resolution in both men and women, of scorn of what is mean, base, and selfish, of eager desire to work or fight or suffer as the case may be, provided the need to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and worry.

I do not know whetehr I most pity or most despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that the only things really worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally means cost and effort. If a man or woman, thorugh no fault of his or hers, goes throughout life denied those highest of all joys which spring only form home life, from the having and bringing up of many healthy children, I feel for them deep and respectful sympathy; . . . But the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish asto dislkie having children, is in effect a crimianl against the race and should be an object of contemptuous abhorence by all healthy children.

--Theodore Roosevelt, in a letter to Bessie Van Vorst, October 1902
Roosevelt was appalled by the European population trends of his time which led him to think that many of the nationalities were declining in numbers. GCS