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Page 6
Notwithstanding the development of civilising, Christianising, and
educational institutions, crime, insanity, and pauperism are increasing
with startling rapidity. The true cause is to be found deep down in
biological truth. Society is breeding from defective stock. The best fit
to produce the best offspring are ceasing to produce their kind, while
the fertility of the worst remains undisturbed. The most striking
demographical phenomenon of recent years is the declining birth-rate of
civilised nations. In Germany the birth-rate has fallen from 40 to 35
per thousand of the population; in England from 35 to 30; in Ireland
from 26 to 22; in France from 26 to 21; and in the United States from 36
to 30 during the last twenty years; while, in New Zealand, it has
declined from 40.8, in 1880, to 25.6, in 1900. In Australia there were
47,000 less births in 1899 than would have occurred under the rates
prevailing ten years ago.
There is a consensus of opinion among demographists that this decline is
due to the voluntary curtailment of the family in married life. Prudence
is the motive, and self-restraint the means by which this curtailment is
made possible. But prudence and self-restraint are the characteristic
attributes of the best citizens. They are conspicuous by their absence
in the worst; and it is a matter of common observation that the
hopelessly poor, the drunken and improvident, the criminal and the
defective have the largest families, while those in the higher walks of
life rejoice in smaller numbers. The very qualities, therefore, that
make the social unit a law-abiding and useful citizen, who could and
should raise the best progeny for the State, also enable him to limit
his family, or escape the responsibility of family life altogether;
while, on the other hand, the very qualities which make a man a social
burden, a criminal, a pauper, or a drunkard--improvidence and defective
inhibition--ensure that his fertility will be unrestrained, except by
the checks of biological law. And it now comes about that the good
citizen, who curtails his family, has the defective offspring of the bad
citizen thrown upon his hands to support; and the humanitarian zeal,
born of Christian sentiment, which is at flood-tide to-day, ensures that
all the defectives born to the world shall not only be nursed and
tended, but shall have the same opportunities of the highest possible
fertility enjoyed by their defective progenitors.
A higher and nobler human happiness is attainable only through social
evolution, and this comes from greater freedom of thought, from bolder
enquiry, from broader experience, and from a scientific study of the
laws of causation. What "is" becomes "right" from custom, but with our
yearnings for a higher ideal, sentiment slowly yields to the logic of
comparison, and, often wiping from our eyes the sorrows over vanishing
idols, we behold broader vistas of human powers, possibilities, duties,
and destiny.
As the proper study of mankind is man, influenced wholly by a desire to
be useful to a society to which I am indebted for the pleasures of
civilised life, I offer this brief volume as a comment on a phase of the
social condition of the times, and as my conclusions regarding its
interest for the future.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM STATED.
_The spread of moral restraint as a check.--Predicted by Malthus.--The
declining Birth-rate.--Its Universality.--Most conspicuous in New
Zealand.--Great increase in production of food.--With rising food
rate falling birth-rate.--Malthus's checks.--His use of the term "moral
restraint."--The growing desire to evade family obligations.--Spread
of physiological knowledge.--All limitation involves self
restraint.--Motives for limitation.--Those who do and those who do not
limit.--Poverty and the Birth-rate. Defectives prolific and propagate
their kind.--Moral restraint held to include all sexual interference
designed to limit families.--Power of self-control an attribute of the
best citizens.--Its absence an attribute of the worst.--Humanitarianism
increases the number and protects the lives of defectives.--The ratio of
the unfit to the fit.--Its dangers to the State.--Antiquity of the
problem.--The teaching of the ancients.--Surgical methods already
advocated._
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