Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/417

Rh of America, "where the classes of ability—the classes which take as their standard an academic education—are not reproducing themselves, their average number of offspring being less than two; we reach the state of affairs which Mr. Sydney Webb tells us is demonstrable in another intellectual circle in this country, an almost childless population of noninherited ability. And against this we have to set the maximum fertility which is reached by the degenerate stocks! Individual welfare and race welfare, are they really as opposed as they appear? Is it true insight to consider that the fewer children the better is their prospect in life? I can not think that the time has come when the family is no longer an effective social unit. Is the family of two really in a stronger condition to face the world? Is there not mutual help and strength in kinship, and as age comes on must the old and feeble be left to the care of strangers? Eugenically Mr. Powys, in his fine memoir on fertility and duration of life in New South Wales, has shown that in Australia the longest-lived women are the mothers neither of small nor of inordinately large families. They are the mothers of five to six children. Eugenically we have shown that the two or three first-born members of a family are more liable to insanity (Heron), tuberculosis (Pearson), criminality (Goring) and mental defect. Fig. 6 will illustrate this. The excess of pathological cases among the earlier born is very significant. Economically, is it not true that if six degenerates are born to two, and not six, sound men and women, those two will have to do triple work to provide—in prison, asylum, institution and hospital—for this mass of the incompetent? I am not sure that a strong case could not be made out against the small family even on the basis of individual welfare! But I would rather appeal on this point to race instinct and to the social conscience. The progress of the race inevitably demands a dominant fertility in the fitter stocks. If that principle be not recognized as axiomatic by the mentally and bodily fit themselves, if the statesman does not accept it as a guide in social legislation, then the race will degenerate, until, sinking into barbarism, it may rise again through the toilsome stages of purification by crude natural selection. I am not pessimistic in this attitude. I know that the English people has been aroused to self-consciousness more than once in its history, and I believe that now it can be brought to realize that safety lies in a conscious race-culture. If race feeling can be appealed to by men trained to see the bearing of great biological laws on human growth, then we shall not create a mere passing wave of national emotion conveniently satisfied by the appointment, dead before the report, of a royal commission. The time seems upon us when the biological sciences shall begin to do for man what the