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Page 8
To the great mass of people this is possible only when the numbers of
the family are limited. As the numbers of the family increase, the
difficulties of clothing and feeding and educating increase, and each
member is the poorer for every birth, and in this sense an increasing
birth-rate is a cause of poverty. The sense in which poverty causes a
high birth-rate will be dealt with later on.
It will be readily conceded, that those actuated by the motives just
considered, those with the keenest sense of responsibility in life,
those capable of exercising the self-restraint which family limitation
requires, constitute the best type of citizens in any community. From
such the State has good reason to expect the best stock.
It is one purpose of this work to show that this class, which can and
should produce the best in the largest numbers, is being overwhelmed
with the burden of supporting an ever-increasing number of incapables,
and, largely in consequence of this increasing burden and
responsibility, are unwilling to produce, because they are unable
adequately to support their own kind.
There is a class in every large community, whose sense of responsibility
in life is at zero, whose self-control is substituted by the law and its
sanctions, and whose modes and habits of life are little better than
those of the lower animals. Their appetites are stronger, their desires,
though fewer, are more intense, and their self-control less easily and
less frequently exerted than those in the highest planes of life.
In the first place then they have less desire to limit their families,
and less power to exercise the self-restraint that is necessary to do
so. Less sense of responsibility is attached to the rearing of a family,
whilst the education of their children gives them little or no concern.
They entertain no ambition that members of their family should compete
in the struggle for social status. Their instincts and their impulses
are their guide in all things. They marry early, and procreation is
unrestrained except by the hardships of life.
This constitutes a numerous class in every large community, and includes
the criminal, the drunkard, and the pauper, and many defectives such as
epileptics and imbeciles. Now all these propagate their kind. The checks
to the increase of this class, are the checks which are common to the
lower animals, and which were elaborated in his first essay by Malthus.
They are vice and misery.
If it were not for moral restraint (not the limited restraint of
Malthus, delayed marriages simply), but restraint in the wider sense,
within as well as without the marriage bond, and including all
artificial checks to conception, these two checks, vice and misery,
would absolutely control the population of the world.
The mind of man has added to the checks which control increase in the
lower animals, a new check, which applies to, and can be exercised only
by himself, and the problem is, how far will misery and vice as checks
to the population be eliminated, and moral restraint take their places?
And if this restraint must control and determine the population of the
future how far will its exercise affect the moral and mental evolution
of the race?
If moral restraint with the consequent limitations of families is the
peculiar characteristic of the best people in the state, and the absence
of this characteristic expressing itself in normal fertility is peculiar
to the worst people of the state, the future of the race may be divined,
by reference to the history of the great nations of antiquity.
An accumulating amount of evidence shows that society is face to face
with this grave aspect of the population question. The birth-rate of the
unfit is steadily maintained. Improved conditions of life increase the
number that arrive at maturity and enter the procreative period, so that
not only are defectives born into the world at a constant rate, but
sanitary laws and a growing impatience with the sufferings of the poor,
tend so to improve their conditions of life, as to increase their
birth-rate and their chances of arriving at adult life.
Shortly stated then, the problem that society has to solve is this,--The
birth-rate is rapidly declining amongst the most fit to produce the best
offspring, while it is steadily maintained amongst the least fit, so
that the relative proportion of the unfit born into the world is
annually increasing.
What should be the State's attitude to this problem, and how it should
attempt to solve it will be discussed in detail in a subsequent chapter.
Let it suffice to say now, that the right of the State to interfere
directly with the limitation of families amongst the best classes would
find few advocates amongst reformers.
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