The Fertility of the Unfit | Page 8

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.
The right of the State to say, however, that the criminal, the drunkard,
the diseased, and the pauper, shall not propagate their kind should be
stoutly maintained by all rational men.
Most of the nations of history have recognized the gravity of the
population question, but they were mostly concerned with the tendency
of the numbers in the State to increase beyond the means of subsistence,