Page:The American Magazine (1906-1956) - volume 73.pdf/600

580 as to the actual mining. Sensitively and obediently, the birth rate of the mining region of Cornwall dropped again, and so did that of the trading towns and county centers like York.

After these, we find the Education Act of 1899 forbidding the employment of children under twelve in any way to interfere with full attendance at school. We find a Factory Act in 1891, again raising the age of child-employment, and restricting the employment of women after child-birth. And the whole birth rate of England responded with a brisk decline.

Let us consider this matter without sentiment. Let us survey the women and children involved in this situation as calmly as though they were pawns on a chessboard, in the effort to get a purely economic and social estimate of the effect of these Acts of Parliament.

Here is the net result. In England, at the present time, a child-bearing woman is economically non-productive. So is a child under twelve years of age. A child under sixteen has his economic productivity stringently restricted.

But so it ought to be, you say. Of course,—all these things are right, quite right. Yet at the same time it must be clear that the people whose children used to be an economic asset—used to contribute to the support of the family by the time they were six or eight years old—are not going to have any children if they can help it now that the economic value of their children is taken away.

I can imagine the pain and shock that a reader will experience at hearing children spoken of as an economic asset, as goods, brought into the world on account of their economic value to the family, kept out of it when that value is decreased or destroyed. I sympathize with the sense of outrage that the reader feels; I feel it myself, feel it keenly. But what are we to do—hide our heads in the sand? The thing simply is so. You may not like it, I do not; but the fact is that to a very large part of the working population of the world a child is goods. With these, therefore, the production of children is roughly subject to the law of supply and demand. When Parliament or Congress or a State Legislature diminishes the earning power of children—takes away their economic value, in part or in whole, by a child-labor law,—the supply of children diminishes at once. It is not only true of England but true of the United States; not only true of Bradford and Bolton, but true of Brockton and Braddock—true the world over. Every child-labor law that puts an economic penally on parentage—and every English law, and, as far as I am aware, every one of our child-labor laws as well, is so constructed—reduces the birth rate. And in England, the cumulative effect of the whole series of such laws has gone so far as to threaten the self-perpetuating power of England's population.

But now some one with a philosophical turn will say, Very well, it is a first-rate thing to have this salutary check put upon the indiscriminate reproduction of poor children. Poor people ought not to have any more children than they can afford to keep; and if the average Bradford family has been cut down from seven children to four or three, so much the better for Bradford and for England. If we can restrain our poor working people from raising large families, from being still further impoverished by the cost of large batches of dependent children, so much the better for us.

Just so. Matthew Arnold said this forty years ago, and I, for one, accepted it from him without question. It was his solution of the problem of the reeking misery of the East End of London. He said that it was necessary to teach the poor that for a man to have more children than he could afford to keep, not too precariously, was as culpable an extravagance as having a larger house, more horses and carriages, or more or better furniture and pictures than he could afford to pay for.

Well, the Education and Factory Acts have certainly taught this lesson. If Mr. Arnold were alive, he could see his counsel at work, and nearly everyone agreeing with him. No doubt, too, that from a strictly family standpoint, he was largely right; but from the social point of view, from the standpoint of the state, he was far wrong.

For this new statistical science of Eugenics immediately puts before us the effect of a strange natural law of primogeniture. It shows that the physical and mental condition of early members of a family—first-born and second-born—is sharply differentiated from that of later members. Where, for example, tuberculosis, insanity, criminality, albinism are found in a family, they are found to predominate tremendously in the first- and second-born over those born later.

The distribution of these disorders among the children of a family would be expected to be tolerably uniform. But, in fact, observation shows nearly twice as many cases of tuberculosis in the first-born of tuberculous families as the mathematical probability would lead us to expect. The actual observed frequency being represented by 112, the expected frequency is about 66. In the