The Fertility of the Unfit | Page 7

from 35 to 29.3 during the same time; in Ireland, from 26 to
22.9; in France, from 26 to 21.9; in the United States of America
(between the years 1880 and 1890) the decline has been from 36 to 30;
while in New Zealand it gradually and persistently declined from 40.8
in 1880 to 25.6 in 1900.
During the period, 1875-1890, the rapid strides made in industry and
production have been unparallelled in the history of the world. Wealth
has accumulated on all sides, and production and distribution have far
outrun the needs and demands of population. To-day food is far more
abundant, cheaper, and therefore more accessible to all classes of the
people than it was 50 years ago, and coincident with this rapid and
abundant increase in those things which go to supply the necessities,
the comforts, and even the luxuries of life, there has been a constant
and uniform decline in the birth-rate, and this decrease is even more
conspicuous in those nations in which the rate of production has been
most pronounced. It would even be true to say that the birth-rate during
recent years is in inverse proportion to the rate of production.
At first sight this might appear to falsify the law of population
enunciated by Malthus. Malthus maintained that population tended to
increase beyond the means of subsistence; that three checks constantly
operated to limit population--vice, misery, and moral restraint: vice,
due largely to diseased conditions, misery, due to poverty and want,
and moral restraint due to a dread of these. I shall show later that
nothing has been said or written to add to or take away from the truth
and force of these great principles, but, that the moral restraint of
Malthus has been practised to an extent, and in a direction of which the
great economist never dreamt. By moral restraint in the limitation of
families Malthus meant only delayed marriage. In so far as men and
women abstained from, or delayed their marriage, on the ground of
inability to support a family, they fulfilled the law, and followed the
advice of Malthus. Continence without the marriage bond was assumed;
incontinence was classed with another check vice.
Contrary to the expectations arising out of the famous progressions,

wealth and production have increased and the birth-rate has decreased.
It is the purpose of this work to show what are the causes that have led
to this decline, that those causes are not equally operative through all
classes of the people, and that the chief cause of the decline of the
birth-rate is the desire on the part of both sexes to limit the number they
have to support and educate. The considerations that lead up to, and, to
some extent, justify this desire, will be discussed later.
The fact remains that an increasingly large number of people have
come to the conclusion that the burden and responsibility of family
obligations limit their enjoyments in life, their ambition, and even their
scope for usefulness, and have discovered, through the spread of
physiological information, means by which marriage may be entered
upon without necessarily incurring these responsibilities and
limitations.
It is the knowledge of these physiological laws and the practice of rules
arising out of that knowledge, that account for the declining birth-rate
of civilized nations.
If it be true that the birth-rate is controlled by a voluntary effort on the
part of married people to limit their families, and that that effort implies
self restraint and self denial, it would not be too much to claim that
those most capable of exercising self-control and with the strongest
motives for such exercise, are those most responsible for the declining
birth-rate, and that those with least self-control and the fewest motives
for exercising the control they have, are most likely to have the normal
number of children.
It has already been suggested, that the desire to limit families is due to
a consciousness of responsibility on the part of prospective parents.
They realise the stress of competition in the struggle for existence, they
are anxious for their own pecuniary and social stability, and even more
anxious that the children, for whose birth they are responsible, should
be provided with the necessities and comforts of life which health and
development require. They are eager, too, that their children should be
equipped with a good education, and thus be given a fair advantage in
the race of life.

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