The Fertility of the Unfit | Page 3

and when an evil.--Oligantrophy.--Artificial checks are physiological sins.

CHAPTER VII.
--WHO PREVENT p. 64
Desire for family limitation result of our social system.--Desire and practice not uniform through all classes.--The best limit, the worst do not.--Early marriages and large families.--N.Z. marriage rates.--Those who delay, and those who abstain from marriage.--Good motives mostly actuate.--All limitation implies restraint.--Birth-rates vary inversely with prudence and self-control.--The limited family usually born in early married life when progeny is less likely to be well developed.--Our worst citizens most prolific. Effect of poverty on fecundity.--Effect of alcoholic intemperance.--Effect of mental and physical defects.--Defectives propagate their kind.--The intermittent inhabitants of Asylums and Gaols constitute the greatest danger to society.--Character the resultant of two forces--motor impulse and inhibition.--Chief criminal characteristic is defective inhibition.--This defect is strongly hereditary.--It expresses itself in unrestrained fertility.

CHAPTER VIII.
--THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE FIT IN RELATION TO STATE p. 77
The State's ideal in relation to the fertility of its subjects.--Keen competition means great effort and great waste of life.--If in the minds of the citizens space and food are ample multiplication works automatically.--To New Zealanders food now includes the luxuries as well as the necessities of life.--Men are driven to the alternative of supporting a family of their own or a degenerate family of defectives.--The State enforces the one but cannot enforce the other.--New Zealand taxation.--The burden of the bread-winner.--As the State lightens this burden it encourages fertility.--The survival of the unfit makes the burden of the fit.

CHAPTER IX.
--THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE UNFIT IN RELATION TO THE STATE p. 85
Ancient methods of preventing the fertility of the unfit.--Christian sentiment suppressed inhuman practices.--Christian care brings many defectives to the child-bearing period of life.--The association of mental and physical defects.--Who are the unfit?--The tendency of relatives to cast their degenerate kinsfolk on the State.--Our social conditions manufacture defectives and foster their fertility.--The only moral force that limits families is inhibition with prudence.--Defective self-control transmitted hereditarily.--Dr. MacGregor's cases.--The transmission of insanity.--Celibacy of the insane is the prophylaxis of insanity in the race.--The environment of the unfit.--Defectives snatched from Nature's clutches.--At the age of maturity they are left to propogate their kind.

CHAPTER X.
--WHAT AN?SETICS AND ANTISEPTICS HAVE MADE POSSIBLE p. 99
Education of defectives in prudence and self-restraint of little avail.--Surgical suggestions discussed.

CHAPTER XI.
--TUBO-LIGATURE p. 110
The fertility of the criminal a greater danger to society than his depredations.--Artificial sterility of women.--The menopause artificially induced. Untoward results.--The physiology of the Fallopian tubes.--Their ligature procures permanent sterility.--No other results immediate or remote.--Some instances due to disease.--Defective women and the wives of defective men would welcome protection from unhealthy offspring.

CHAPTER XII.
--SUGGESTIONS AS TO APPLICATION p. 118
The State's humanitarian zeal protects the lives and fosters the fertility of the degenerate.--A confirmed or hereditary criminal defined.--Law on the subject of sterilization could at first be permissive.--It should apply, to begin with, to criminals and the insane.--Marriage certificates of health should be required.--Women's readiness to submit to surgical treatment for minor as well as major pelvic diseases.--Surgically induced sterility of healthy women a greater crime than abortion.--This danger not remote.
CONCLUSION p. 124

THE FERTILITY OF THE UNFIT.
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION.
Biology is the Science of Life. It seeks to explain the phenomena of all life, whether animal or vegetable. Its methods are observation and experiment. It observes the tiny cell on the surface of an egg yolk, and watches it divide and multiply until it becomes a great mass of cells, which group off or differentiate, and rearrange and alter their shapes. It observes how little organs unfold themselves, or evolve out of these little cell groups--how gradual, but how unvarying the change; how one group becomes a bone, another a brain, another a muscle, to constitute in three short weeks the body of a matured chick. Those little tendons like silken threads, that run down those slender pink legs to each and every toe, and move its little joints so swiftly that we hardly see them--that little brain, no bigger than a tiny seed, in which is planted a mysterious force that impels it to set all those brand-new muscles in motion, and to dart after a fly with the swiftness of an arrow--all this wondrous mechanism, all this beauteous structure, all this perfection of function, all this adaptation to environment, have evolved from a few microscopic cells in three short weeks.
Biology is the science that observes all this, and enunciates the law that the life history of this animal cell, _i.e._, its history from a simple unicellular state in the egg, to its complex multicellular state in the matured chick, represents the history of the race to which the chick belongs. If we could trace that chicken back through all its ancestry, we would discover at different periods in the history of life upon the globe (about 100 million years, according to Haeckel) exactly the stages of development we