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Title: The Fertility of the Unfit
Author: Chapple, W. A. (William Allan), 1864-1936
Language: English
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The Fertility of the Unfit
BY
W.A. CHAPPLE, M.D., Ch.B., M.R.C.S., D.P.H.
WITH PREFACE BY RUTHERFORD WADDELL, M.A., D.D.
MELBOURNE: CHRISTCHURCH, WELLINGTON, DUNEDIN, N.Z., AND
LONDON
WHITCOMBE & TOMBS LIMITED.
PREFACE.
The problem with which Dr. Chapple deals in this book is one of extreme
gravity. It is also one of pressing importance. The growth of the
Criminal is one of the most ominous clouds on every national horizon. In
spite of advances in criminology the rate of increase is so alarming
that the "Unfit" threatens to be to the new Civilization what the Hun
and Vandal were to the old. How to deal with this dangerous class is
perhaps the most serious question that faces Sociologists at this hour.
And something must be done speedily, else our civilization is in
imminent peril of being swamped by the increasingly disproportionate
progeny of the Criminal.
Various methods have from time to time been suggested to ward off this
danger. In my judgment one of the most effective has yet to be tried in
the Colony--the system of indeterminate sentences. Nothing can be more
futile than the present method of criminal procedure. After a certain
stated period in gaol, we allow Criminals--even of the most dangerous
character--to go out free without making the slightest effort to secure
that they are fit to be returned to society. We quarantine the
plague-stricken or small-pox ship, and keep the passengers isolated till
the disease is eradicated. But we send up the Criminal only for a
definite time, and at the end of that, he is allowed to go at large even
though we may know he is a more dangerous character than when he entered
the gaol. This is egregious folly.
Dr. Chapple's treatise, however, takes things as they are. He proposes
to save society from the multiplication of its Criminals by a remedy of
the most radical kind. When he was good enough to ask me to write a
preface for his book I hesitated somewhat. I read the substance of it in
MS.S. and was deeply impressed by it. But still I am in some doubt. I am
not quite prepared to accept at once Dr. Chapple's proposed remedy.
Neither am I prepared to reject it. I am simply an enquirer, trying to
arrive at the truth regarding this clamant social problem. The time has
certainly come when the issues raised in Dr. Chapple's book must be
faced. It is very desirable therefore, that the public should have these
put before it in a frank, cautious way, by experts who understand what
they are writing about, and have a due sense of the grave
responsibilities involved. Dr. Chapple's contribution seems to me very
fully to satisfy these requirements. No doubt both his premises and
conclusions are open to criticism at various points. It is, indeed, not
unlikely that the plan whereby he proposes to limit the "fertility of
the Unfit" may come with a sort of shock to some readers.
It is, perhaps, well that it should, for it may lead to thought and
criticism. In any case, this policy of drift must be dropped and Dr.
Chapple's remedy, or some other, promptly adopted. A preface is not the
place to discuss the pro's and con's of Dr. Chapple's treatise. My main
object in this foreword is to commend to the public who take an interest
in this grave problem a discussion of it, which is alike timely and
thorough and reverent. And this, I believe, readers will find in the
following pages.
RUTHERFORD WADDELL.
_Dunedin_,
_Dec. 9th, 1903._
FROM DR. J.G. FINDLAY, M.A., LL.D.
DEAR DR. CHAPPLE,--
You are aware that I gave your Treatise on the "Fertility of the Unfit"
a very careful perusal. It is a subject to which I have devoted some
attention, both at College and since I left College, and I feel
competent to say that no finer work on the subject has been accomplished
than that contained in your Treatise. I consider it of value, not only
from a statistical point of view, but also from a point of view of
scientific originality.
I have no doubt that if the work were published in New Zealand it would
be read and bought by a large number of people. I may add that I
discussed your views with competent critics, and they share the opinion
which I have expressed in this letter. I sincerely hope that the volume
will be published, and need not add that my friends and myself will be
subscribers for copies.
Yours sincerely,
J.G. FINDLAY.
* * * * *
FROM MALCOLM ROSS, ESQ.
DEAR DR. CHAPPLE,--
I am pleased to hear that your MS. is to be published. The subject is
one that must attract an increasing amount of attention on the part of
all who have the true interests of the state at heart. There can be
no doubt that the Parliamentary machine has failed, lamentably, to
grapple with the problems you have referred to. At the present time,
when some of our most earnest statesmen and greatest thinkers are
discussing the supposed commercial decadence of the nation, the
publication of such a treatise as you have prepared is opportune, and a
perusal of it prompts the thought that the main remedy lies deeper, and
may be found in sociological even more than in economic reform.
I do not profess myself competent to express any opinion regarding the
remedy you propose. That is a matter for a carefully selected expert
Royal Commission. The whole question, however, is one that might with
advantage be discussed, both in the Press and the Parliament, at the
present time, and I feel sure your book will be welcomed as a valuable
contribution on the subject.
Yours sincerely,
MALCOLM ROSS.
* * * * *
FROM SIR ROBERT STOUT, K.C.M.G., CHIEF JUSTICE.
MY DEAR DR. CHAPPLE,--
I have read your MSS., and am much pleased with it. It puts the problem
of our times very plainly, and I think should be published in England. I
have a friend in England who would, I think, be glad to help, and he is
engaged by one of the large publishing firms in England. If you decide
on sending it to England I shall be glad to write to him, and ask his
assistance. The subject is one that certainly required ventilation, and
whether your remedy is the proper one or not, it ought certainly to be
discussed.
Yours truly,
ROBERT STOUT.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I.--THE PROBLEM STATED p. 1
The spread of moral restraint as a check.--Predicted by Malthus.--The
declining Birth-rate.--Its Universality.--Most conspicuous in New
Zealand. Great increase in production of food.--With rising food
rate falling birth-rate.--Malthus's checks.--His use of the term
"moral restraint."--The growing desire to evade family
obligations.--Spread of physiological knowledge.--All limitation
involves self-restraint.--Motives for limitation.--Those who do and
those who do not limit.--Poverty and the Birth-rate.--Defectives
prolific and propagate their kind.--Moral restraint held to include
all sexual interference designed to limit families.--Power of
self-control an attribute of the best citizens.--Its absence an
attribute of the worst.--Humanitarianism increases the number and
protects the lives of defectives.--The ratio of the unfit to the
fit.--Its dangers to the State.--Antiquity of the problem.--The
teaching of the ancients.--Surgical methods already advocated.
CHAPTER II.--THE POPULATION QUESTION p. 10
The teaching of Aristotle and Plato.--The teaching of Malthus.--His
assailants.--Their illogical position.--Bonar on Malthus and his
work.--The increase of food supplies held by Nitti to refute Malthus.--The
increase of food and the decrease of births.--Mr. Spencer's biological
theory--Maximum birth-rate determined by female capacity to bear
children.--The pessimism of Spencer's law.--Wider definition of moral
restraint.--Where Malthus failed to anticipate the future.--Economic law
operative only through biological law.
CHAPTER III.--DECLINING BIRTH-RATE p. 26
Declining birth-rates rapid and persistent.--Food cost in New
Zealand.--Relation of birth-rate to prosperity before and after
1877.--Neo-Malthusian propaganda.--Marriage rates and fecundity of
marriage.--Statistics of Hearts of Oak Friendly Society.--Deliberate
desire of parents to limit family increase.
CHAPTER IV.--MEANS ADOPTED p. 32
Family responsibility--Natural fertility undiminished.--Voluntary
prevention and physiological knowledge.--New Zealand
experience.--Diminishing influence of delayed marriage.--Practice of
abortion.--Popular sympathy in criminal cases.--Absence of complicating
issues in New Zealand.--Colonial desire for comfort and happiness.
CHAPTER V.--CAUSES OF DECLINING BIRTH-RATE p. 36
Influence of self-restraint without continence.--Desire to limit families
in New Zealand not due to poverty.--Offspring cannot be limited without
self-restraint.--New Zealand's economic condition.--High standard of
general education.--Tendency to migrate within the colony.--Diffusion of
ideas.--Free social migration between all classes.--Desire to migrate
upwards.--Desire to raise the standard of ease and comfort.--Social status
the measure of financial status.--Social attraction of one class to next
below.--Each conscious of his limitation.--Large families confirm this
limitation.--The cost of the family.--The cost of maternity.--The craving
for ease and luxury. Parents' desire for their children's social
success.--Humble homes bear distinguished sons.--Large number with
University education in New Zealand.--No child labour except in hop and
dairy districts.--Hopeless poverty a cause of high birth-rates.--High
birth-rates a cause of poverty.--Fecundity depends on capacity of the
female to bear children.
CHAPTER VI.--ETHICS OF PREVENTION p. 31
Fertility the law of life.--Man interprets and controls this
law.--Marriage law necessary to fix paternal responsibility.--Malthus's
high ideal.--If prudence the motive, continence and celibacy violate
no law.--Post-nuptial intermittent restraint.--Ethics of prevention
judged by consequences.--When procreation is a good 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 ANÆSETICS 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 found in the life history of the chick, and
arrive at last at a primordial cell.
What is true of the chick is true of all life. This is the law of
evolution. It is true of all plant and animal life; it is true of man as
an individual; it is true of his mind as well as of his body; it is true
of society as an aggregation of individuals. As men have evolved from a
lower to a higher, a simple to a complex state, so they are still
evolving and rising "on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher
things."
Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, is one of the
processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only
the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this
discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion
between the rates of increase in population and food, and the consequent
struggle for existence.
All living organisms require food and space. The power of multiplication
in plants and animals is so great that food or space is sooner or later
entrenched upon, and then commences this inevitable struggle for
existence. In this struggle for life, the individuals best able to
conform to their environment, _i.e._, the best able to resist adverse
circumstances, to sustain hardships, to overcome difficulties, to defend
themselves, to outstrip their fellows, in short, to harmonise function
with environment, survive. These propagate their kind according to the
law of heredity. Variations exist in the progeny, and the individuals
whose variations best adapt them to their environment are the fittest
to, and do, survive.
In a state of nature the weaklings perish. If man interferes with this
state of nature in the lower animals, he may make a selection and
cultivate some particular attribute. This is artificial selection, and
is best exemplified in the experiments with pigeons. Pasteur saved the
silk industry of France, and perhaps of the whole world, by the
application of this law of artificial selection. The disease of
silkworms, known as Pebrine, was spreading with ruinous rapidity in
France. Pasteur demonstrated that the germ of the disease could be
detected in the blood of affected moths by the aid of the microscope. He
proved that the eggs of diseased moths produced unhealthy worms, and he
advised that the eggs of each moth be kept apart, until the moth was
examined for germs. If these were found, the eggs were to be burned.
Thus the eggs of unhealthy moths were never hatched, and artificial
selection of healthy stock stamped out a disease, and saved a great
industry.
Each individual plant in the struggle for life has only itself to
maintain. In the higher forms of animal life, each animal has its
offspring as well as itself to maintain. In a state of nature, that is
in a state unaffected by man's rational interference, defective
offspring and weaker brethren were the victims of the inexorable law of
natural selection. When Christ gave _his_ reply to the question, "Am I
my brother's keeper?" the defective and the weakling became the special
care of their stronger brother. They constituted thenceforth The Fit
Man's Burden. The work a man has to do during life, in order to support
himself, is the unit of measurement of the burden he has to bear. Many
factors in modern times have helped to reduce that work to a minimum.
The invention of machinery has multiplied his eyes, his hands, his feet;
and one man can now produce, for his own maintenance and comfort, what
it took perhaps a score of men to produce even a century ago. Man's
disabilities from incidental and epidemic disease have been immeasurably
reduced by modern sanitation, and the teaching and practice of
preventive medicine. Agricultural chemistry has made the soil more
productive, and manufacturing arts have aided distribution as well as
production.
All the departments of human knowledge have been placed under
contribution to man's necessity, and longer life, better health, and
more food and clothing for less work, are the blessings on his head
to-day.
While the burden has been lessened by the industrial and scientific
progress of the last half century, it has been augmented by the
fertility of the unfit; and the maintenance in idleness and comfort of
the great and increasing army of defectives constitutes the fit man's
burden. The unfit in the State include all those mental and moral and
physical defectives who are unable or unwilling to support themselves
according to the recognised laws of human society. They include the
criminal, the pauper, the idiot and imbecile, the lunatic, the drunkard,
the deformed, and the diseased. We are now face to face with the
startling fact that this army of defectives is increasing in numbers and
relative fertility.
Consider what a burden is the criminal. Every community is more or less
terrorised by him; our property is liable to be plundered, our houses
invaded, our women ravished, our children murdered. To restrain him we
must build gaols, and keep immense staffs of highly paid officials to
tend him in confinement, and watch him when he is at liberty.
Notwithstanding these, crime is rife, and is rapidly increasing. Says
Douglas Morrison:--"It is perfectly well known to every serious student
of criminal questions, both at home and abroad, that the proportion of
habitual criminals in the criminal population is steadily on the
increase, and was never so high as it is now.... The population under
detention in reformatory institutions is increasing more rapidly than
the growth of the community as a whole, and, as far as it is possible to
see, the juvenile population in prisons is doing the same thing."
Havelock Ellis ("The Criminal," p. 295), Boies, and McKim, all
corroborate this testimony. "Among the three or four millions of
inhabitants of London, one in every five dies in gaol, prison, or
workhouse." ("Heredity and Human Progress," p. 32.)
All these defectives are prolific, and transmit their fatal taints. "In
a certain family of sixteen persons, eight were born deaf and dumb, and
one at least of this family transmitted the defect as far as the third
generation." ("Heredity and Human Progress.") A murderer was the son of
a drunkard; of three brothers, one was normal, one a drunkard, and the
third was a criminal epileptic. Of his three paternal uncles, one was a
murderer, one a half idiot, and one a violent character. Of his four
cousins, sons of the latter, two were half idiots, one a complete idiot,
and the other a lunatic.
There is an agricultural community of about 4000 in the rich and fertile
district in the valley of Artena, in Italy, who have been thieves,
brigands, and assassins since 1155 A.D. They were outlawed by Pope Paul
IV., in 1557, but they still live and flourish in their crime, the
victims of a criminal inheritance. The ratio of homicides in Italy and
Artena is as 9 to 61; of assault and battery as 34 to 205; of highway
robbery as 3 to 145; of theft as 47 to 111. Professor Pellman, of Bonn
University, has traced the careers of a large number of defectives, and
shown their cost to the State. Take this example:--A woman who was a
thief, a drunkard, and a tramp for forty years of her life, had 834
descendants, 709 of whom were traced; 106 were born out of wedlock, 142
were beggars, and 64 more lived on charity. Of the women, 181 lived
disreputable lives. There were in the family 76 convicts, 7 of whom were
convicted of murder. In 75 years, this family cost their country in
almshouses, trials, courts, prisons, and correctional establishments
about £250,000. The injury inflicted by this one family on person and
property was simply incalculable.
In New Zealand, the ratio of those dependent upon the State, or on
public or private support, has gone up from 16.86 per thousand of
population, over 15 years of age in 1878, to 23.01 in 1901. The ratio of
defectives, including deaf and dumb, blind, lunatics, epileptics,
paralytics, crippled and deformed, debilitated and infirm, has gone up
from 5.4 per thousand, over fifteen years, in 1874, to 11.4 in 1896,
declining slightly to 10.29 in 1901. The ratio of lunatics has gone up
from 1.9, in 1874, to 3.4 in 1901. This is the period of the most rapid
and persistent decline in the New Zealand birth-rate; and, coincident
with this period, the marriage-rate went down from 8.8 per thousand in
1874, to 5.8 in 1886, and then gradually rose to 7.83 in 1901. The
number of weekly rations (Parkes's standard), purchasable by the average
weekly wages of an artisan in Wellington province, has gone up from 11
to 16.5 between the years 1877 and 1897. In other words, the price of
food and the rate of wages in 1897 would enable an artisan to fill
5½ more mouths than he could have done at the rates prevailing in
1877.
Notwithstanding the development of civilising, Christianising, and
educational institutions, crime, insanity, and pauperism are increasing
with startling rapidity. The true cause is to be found deep down in
biological truth. Society is breeding from defective stock. The best fit
to produce the best offspring are ceasing to produce their kind, while
the fertility of the worst remains undisturbed. The most striking
demographical phenomenon of recent years is the declining birth-rate of
civilised nations. In Germany the birth-rate has fallen from 40 to 35
per thousand of the population; in England from 35 to 30; in Ireland
from 26 to 22; in France from 26 to 21; and in the United States from 36
to 30 during the last twenty years; while, in New Zealand, it has
declined from 40.8, in 1880, to 25.6, in 1900. In Australia there were
47,000 less births in 1899 than would have occurred under the rates
prevailing ten years ago.
There is a consensus of opinion among demographists that this decline is
due to the voluntary curtailment of the family in married life. Prudence
is the motive, and self-restraint the means by which this curtailment is
made possible. But prudence and self-restraint are the characteristic
attributes of the best citizens. They are conspicuous by their absence
in the worst; and it is a matter of common observation that the
hopelessly poor, the drunken and improvident, the criminal and the
defective have the largest families, while those in the higher walks of
life rejoice in smaller numbers. The very qualities, therefore, that
make the social unit a law-abiding and useful citizen, who could and
should raise the best progeny for the State, also enable him to limit
his family, or escape the responsibility of family life altogether;
while, on the other hand, the very qualities which make a man a social
burden, a criminal, a pauper, or a drunkard--improvidence and defective
inhibition--ensure that his fertility will be unrestrained, except by
the checks of biological law. And it now comes about that the good
citizen, who curtails his family, has the defective offspring of the bad
citizen thrown upon his hands to support; and the humanitarian zeal,
born of Christian sentiment, which is at flood-tide to-day, ensures that
all the defectives born to the world shall not only be nursed and
tended, but shall have the same opportunities of the highest possible
fertility enjoyed by their defective progenitors.
A higher and nobler human happiness is attainable only through social
evolution, and this comes from greater freedom of thought, from bolder
enquiry, from broader experience, and from a scientific study of the
laws of causation. What "is" becomes "right" from custom, but with our
yearnings for a higher ideal, sentiment slowly yields to the logic of
comparison, and, often wiping from our eyes the sorrows over vanishing
idols, we behold broader vistas of human powers, possibilities, duties,
and destiny.
As the proper study of mankind is man, influenced wholly by a desire to
be useful to a society to which I am indebted for the pleasures of
civilised life, I offer this brief volume as a comment on a phase of the
social condition of the times, and as my conclusions regarding its
interest for the future.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
THE PROBLEM STATED.
_The spread of moral restraint as a check.--Predicted by Malthus.--The
declining Birth-rate.--Its Universality.--Most conspicuous in New
Zealand.--Great increase in production of food.--With rising food
rate falling birth-rate.--Malthus's checks.--His use of the term "moral
restraint."--The growing desire to evade family obligations.--Spread
of physiological knowledge.--All limitation involves self
restraint.--Motives for limitation.--Those who do and those who do not
limit.--Poverty and the Birth-rate. Defectives prolific and propagate
their kind.--Moral restraint held to include all sexual interference
designed to limit families.--Power of self-control an attribute of the
best citizens.--Its absence an attribute of the worst.--Humanitarianism
increases the number and protects the lives of defectives.--The ratio of
the unfit to the fit.--Its dangers to the State.--Antiquity of the
problem.--The teaching of the ancients.--Surgical methods already
advocated._
A century has passed since Malthus made his immortal contribution to the
supreme problem of all ages and all people, but the whole aspect of the
population question has changed since his day. The change, however, was
anticipated by the great economist, and predicted in the words:--"The
history of modern civilisation is largely the history of the gradual
victory of the third check over the two others" (_vide_ Essay, 7th
edition, p. 476). The third check is moral restraint and the two others
vice and misery.
The statistics of all civilized nations show a gradual and progressive
decline in the birth-rate much more marked of recent years. In Germany,
between the years 1875 and 1899, it has diminished from 40 to 35.9 per
thousand of the population. In England and Wales, it dropped 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 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,
instead of the tendency to degeneration as it now concerns us.
CHAPTER II.
THE POPULATION QUESTION.
_The Teaching of Aristotle and Plato.--The teaching of Malthus.--His
assailants.--Their illogical position.--Bonar on Malthus and his
work.--The increase of food supplies held by Nitti to refute
Malthus.--The increase of food and the decrease of births.--Mr.
Spencer's biological theory.--Maximum birth-rate determined by female
capacity to bear children.--The pessimism of Spencer's law.--Wider
definition of moral restraint.--Where Malthus failed to anticipate the
future.--Economic law operative only through Biological law._
Births, deaths, and migration are the factors which make up the
population question.
The problem has burned in the minds of all great students of human life
and its conditions.
Aristotle says (Politics ii. 7-5) "The legislator who fixes the amount
of property should also fix the number of children, for if they are too
many for the property, the law must be broken." And he proceeds to
advise (ib. vii. 16-15) "As to the exposure and rearing of children, let
there be a law that no deformed child shall live, but where there are
too many (for in our State population has a limit) when couples have
children in excess and the state of feeling is adverse to the exposure
of offspring, let abortion be procured."
The difficulty of over-population was conspicuous in the minds of
Aristotle and Plato, and these philosophers both held that the State had
a right and a duty to control it.
But some States were almost annihilated because they were not
sufficiently populous, and Aristotle attributes the defeat of Sparta on
one celebrated occasion to this fact. He says:--"The legislators wanting
to have as many Spartans as they could, encouraged the citizens to have
large families, and there is a law at Sparta, that the father of three
sons should be exempt from military service, and he who has four, from
all the burdens of the State. Yet it is obvious that if there were many
children, the land being distributed as it is, many of these must
necessarily fall into poverty."
The problem in the mind of the Greek philosophers was this.
Over-population is a cause of poverty; under-population is a cause of
weakness. Defectives are an additional burden to the State. How shall
population be so regulated as to established an equilibrium between the
stability of the State, and the highest well-being of the citizens?
The combined philosophy of the Greeks counselled the encouragement of
the best citizens to increase their kind, and the practice of the
exposure of infants and abortion.
A century of debate has raged round the name of Malthus, the great
modern analyst of the population problem. He published his first essay
on population in 1798, a modest pamphlet, which fed so voraciously on
the criticism supplied to it, that it developed into a mighty
contribution to a great social problem, second only in time and in
honour to the work of his great predecessor in economic studies, Adam
Smith.
Malthus's first essay defined and described the laws of multiplication
as they apply only to the lower animals and savage man. It was only in
his revised work, published five years later, that he described moral
restraint as a third check to population.
Adverse criticism had been bitter and severe, and Malthus saw that his
first work had been premature. He went to the continent to study the
problem from personal observation in different countries. He profited by
his observation, and by the writings of his critics, and published his
matured work in 1803.
The distinguishing feature about this edition was the addition of moral
restraint as a check, to the two already described, vice and misery.
Malthus maintained that population has the power of doubling itself
every 25 years. Not that it _does_ so, or _had done_ so, or _will do
so_, but that it is _capable_ of doing so, and he instanced the American
Colonies to prove this statement.
One would scarcely think it was necessary to enforce this distinction,
between what population has done, or is doing, and what it is capable
of doing. But when social writers, like Francesco Nitti (Population and
the Social System, p. 90), urge as an argument against Malthus's
position that, if his principles were true, a population of 176,000,000
in the year 1800 would have required a population of only one in the
time of our Saviour, it is necessary to insist upon the difference
between _increase_ and the _power of increase_.
One specific instance of this doubling process is sufficient to prove
the _power of increase_ possessed by a community, and the instance of
the American Colonies, cited by Malthus, has never been denied.
A doubling of population in 25 years was thus looked upon by Malthus as
the normal increase, under the most favourable conditions; but the
checks to increase, vice, misery, and moral restraint are operative in
varying degrees of intensity in civilized communities, and these may
limit the doubling to once in 50, or once in 100 years, stop it
altogether, or even sweep a nation from the face of the earth.
The natural increase among the lower animals is limited by misery only,
in savage man by vice and misery only, and in civilized man by misery,
vice, and moral restraint.
Misery is caused by poverty, or the need of food or clothing, and is
thus proportionate to the means of subsistence. As the means of
subsistence are abundant, misery will be less, the death-rate lower,
and _caeteris paribus_ the birth-rate higher. The increase will be
directly proportional to the means of subsistence.
Vice as a check to increase, is common to civilized and savage man, and
limits population by artificial checks to conception, abortion,
infanticide, disease, and war. The third check, moral restraint, is
peculiar to civilized man, and in the writings of Malthus, consists in
restraint from marriage or simply delayed marriage.
Bonar says (Malthus and his Work, p. 53), "Moral restraint in the pages
of Malthus, simply means continence which is abstinence from marriage
followed by no irregularities."
These checks have their origin in a need for, and scarcity of
food,--food comprising all those conditions necessary to healthy life.
The need of food is vital and permanent. The desire for food, immediate
and prospective, is the first motive of all animal activity, but the
amount of food available in the world is limited, and the possible
increase of food is estimated by Malthus at an arithmetical ratio.
Whether or not this is an accurate estimate of the ratio of food
increase is immaterial. Malthus's famous progressions, the geometrical
ratio of increase in the case of animals, and the arithmetical ratio of
increase in the case of food, contain the vital and irrefutable truth of
the immense disproportion between the power of reproduction in man and
the power of production in food.
Under the normal conditions of life, the population tends constantly to
press upon, and is restrained by the limits of food. The true
significance of the word _tends_ must not be overlooked, or a similar
fallacy to that of Nitti's will occur, when he overlooked the
significance of the term "power to multiply." It is perfectly true to
say, that population _tends_ to press upon the limits of subsistence,
and unrestrained by moral means or man's reason actually does so.
Some social writers appear to think that, if they can show that
production has far outstripped population, that, in other words,
population for the last fifty years at least has _not_ pressed upon the
limits of food, Malthus by that fact is refuted.
Nitti says (Population and the Social System, p. 91), "But now that
statistics have made such great progress, and the comparison between the
population and the means of subsistence in a fixed period of time is no
longer based upon hypothesis, but upon concrete and certain data in a
science of observation it is no longer possible to give the name of law
to a theory like that of Malthus, which is a complete disagreement with
facts. As our century has been free from the wars, pestilences and
famines which have afflicted other ages, population has increased as it
never did before, and, nevertheless, the production of the means of
subsistence has far exceeded the increase of men."
And later on (p. 114) he says "Malthus's law explains nothing just as it
comprehends nothing. Bound by rigid formulas which are belied by history
and demography, it is incapable of explaining not only the mystery of
poverty, but the alternate reverses of human civilization."
Nitti's conclusions are based largely on the fact that while food
supplies have become abundant and cheap, birth-rates have steadily and
persistently declined.
No-one who has studied the economic and vital statistics of the last
half century can fail to be impressed with the change that has come over
the relative ratios of increase in population and food.
Bonar says (Malthus and his Work, p. 165), "The industrial progress of
the country (France) has been very great. Fifty years ago, the
production of wheat was only half of what it is to-day, of meat less
than half. In almost every crop, and every kind of food, France is
richer now than then, in the proportion of 2 to 1. In all the
conveniences of life (if food be the necessaries) the increased supply
is as 4 to 1, while foreign trade has become as 6 to 1."
In a remarkable table prepared by Mr. F.W. Galton, and quoted by Mr.
Sydney Webb in "Industrial Democracy," it is clearly shown, that, while
the birth-rate and food-rate (defined as the amount of wheat in Imperial
quarters, purchased with a full week's wages) gradually increased along
parallel lines between 1846 and 1877, the former suddenly decreased from
36.5 per thousand in 1877 to 30 per thousand in 1895, the latter
increasing from .6 to 1.7 for the same period.
The remarkable thing about the facts that this table so clearly
discloses is that with a gradual increase of the means of subsistence
from 1846 to 1877 there is also a gradual increase in the proportion of
births to population. But at the year 1877 there, is a very sudden and
striking increase in food products, and the purchasing power of the
people coincides exactly with a very sudden and striking decrease in the
birth-rate of the people. The greater the decrease in the birth-rate,
the greater the increase in the people's purchasing power. Now, what has
brought about this change in the ratios of increase in population and in
food respectively?
Some serious factor, inoperative during the thirty years prior to 1877
must have suddenly been introduced into the social system, to work such
a marvellous revolution during the last twenty years.
Some economic writers find it easy here to discover a law, and declare
that the birth-rate is in inverse ratio to the abundance of food.
(Doubleday quoted by Nitti, Population and the Social System, p. 55).
Other economic writers of recent date attribute this great change in
ratio of increase to economic causes. Only a few find the explanation in
biological laws.
Herbert Spencer is the champion of the biological explanation of a
decreasing birth-rate.
With the intellectual progress of the race there is a decadence of
sexual instinct. In proportion as an individual concentrates his
energies and attention on his own mental development, does the instinct
to, and power of, generation decrease.
It may be true, it certainly is true, that if an individual's energies
are concentrated in the direction of development of one system of the
body, the other systems to some extent suffer. A great and constant
devotion to the development of the muscular system will produce very
powerful muscles, and great muscular energy, with a strong tendency to,
and pleasure in exercise. It is true also, that time and energy are
monopolized in this creation of muscle, and that less time and energy
are available for mental pursuits and mental exercise.
Up to a certain point muscular exercise aids mental development, but
beyond that point concentration of effort in the direction of muscular
development starves mental growth.
On the other hand, if the education and exercise of the mind receive
all attention, the muscular system will suffer, and to some extent
remain undeveloped. Or generally, one system of the body can be highly
developed only at the expense of some other system, not immediately
concerned.
It is true that the more an individual concentrates his efforts on his
own intellectual development, the more his sexual system suffers, and
the less vigorous his sexual instincts.
And the converse of this is also true, for examples of those with great
sexual powers are numerous.
In plant life, this same law is also in operation. If one system in a
plant, the woody fibre for instance, takes on abundant growth, the fruit
is starved and is less in quality and quantity, and _vice versa_.
But to what extent does this affect fertility? Sexual power and
fertility are not synonymous terms.
The vast profusion of seed in plant and animal life, would allow of an
enormous reduction in the amount produced, without the least affecting
fertility. Even admitting the application of Spencer's law to sexual
vitality, and allowing him to claim that, with the progress of
"individuation," there is a decline in sexual instinct, would the
fertility of the race be affected thereby?
To have any effect at all on the birth-rate, the instinct would have
either to be killed or to be so reduced in intensity as to stop
marriage, or to delay it till very late in life.
When once marriage was contracted sexual union once in every two years,
would, under strictly normal conditions, result in a very large family.
For according to Mr. Spencer's theory, it is the instinct that is
weakened not the power of the spermatozoa to fertilize.
Evidence is wanting, however, to show that there is a decrease in the
sexual power of any nation.
France might be flattered to be told that her low birth-rate is due to
the high intellectual attainments of her people, and that the rapidly
decreasing birth-rate is due to a rapid increase of her intellectual
power during recent years.
Ireland and New Zealand would be equally pleased could they believe that
their low, and still decreasing birth-rate is due to the lessening of
the sexual instinct, attendant upon, and resulting from a high and
increasing intellectual power and activity.
The fact is, that the sexual instinct is so immeasurably in excess of
the maximum power of procreation in the female, that an enormous
reduction in sexual power would require to take place before it would
have any effect on the number of children born.
The number of children born is controlled by the capacity of the human
female to bear children, and one birth in every two years during the
child-bearing period of life is about the maximum capacity.
A moderate diminution in the force of the sexual instinct might lead to
a decrease in the marriage rate, but it would require a very serious
diminution bordering on total extinction of the instinct to exert any
serious effect on the fecundity of marriage.
All that can be claimed for this theory of population is, that,
reasoning from known physiological analogies, we might expect a
weakening of the desire for marriage, coincident with the general
development of intellect in the race.
There are as yet no facts to prove that such weakening has taken or is
taking place, nor are there facts to prove that population has in any
way suffered from this cause.
If such a law obtained, and resulted in a diminished birth-rate, the
future of the race would be the gloomiest possible. An inexorable law
would determine that there could be no mental evolution, for the best of
the race would cease to propagate their kind. All who would arrive at
this standard of mental growth would become barren. And against this
there could be no remedy.
One of the main contentions of this work is that the best have to a
large extent ceased to propagate their kind, but it is not maintained
that this is the result of a biological law, over which there is no
control. It can be safely claimed that to Malthus's three checks to
population--vice, misery, and moral restraint, the demographic phenomena
of a century have added no other. The third check, however, moral
restraint, must be held to include all restraint voluntarily placed by
men and women on the free and natural exercise of their powers of
procreation.
Malthus used the term "moral" in this connection, not so much in
relation to the _motive_ for the restraint, but in relation to the
result, viz., the limitation of the family. The "moral restraint" of
Malthus meant to him, restraint from marriage only, chiefly because of
the inability to support a family. It implied marriage delayed until
there was reasonable hope that the normal family, four in number, could
be comfortably supported, continence in the mean time being assumed.
Bonar interpreting Malthus says (p. 53) that impure celibacy falls under
the head of "vice," and not of "moral restraint."
To Malthus, vice and misery, as checks to population, were an evil
greatly to be deplored in civilized man, and not only did he declare
that moral restraint obtained as a check, but he also declared it a
virtue to be advocated and encouraged in the interest of society, as
well as of the individual.
His moral restraint was delayed marriage with continence. He trusted to
the moral force of the sexual passion in a continent man to stimulate to
work, to thrift, to marriage; to work and save so that he may enter the
marriage state with a reasonable prospect of being able to support a
wife and family.
Malthus never anticipated the changes and developments of recent years.
He advised moral restraint as a preventive measure in the hope that vice
and misery, as checks would be superseded, and that no more would be
born into the world than there was ample food to supply. He believed
that moral restraint was the check of civilized man, and as civilization
proceeded, this check would replace the others, and prevent absolutely
the population pressing upon the limits of subsistence.
He saw in moral restraint only self-denial, constant continence, and
entertained not a doubt, that the generative instinct would be cheated
of its natural fruit. The passion for marriage is so strong (thought
Malthus) that there is no fear for the race; it cannot be
over-controlled.
The gratification of the sexual instinct, and procreation were the same
thing in the mind of Malthus.
But this is not so.
A physiological law makes it possible, in a large proportion of strictly
normal women, for union to take place without fertilisation. If it were
possible to maintain an intermittent restraint in strict conformity with
this law, it would control considerably the population of the world.
It is easier to practice intermittent than to practice constant
restraint.
It is just here that Malthus failed to anticipate the future. Malthus
believed that "moral restraint" would lessen the marriage rate, but
would have no direct effect on the fecundity of marriage.
A man would not put upon himself the self-denial and restraint, which
abstinence from marriage implied, for a longer period than he could
help.
The greater the national prosperity, therefore, the higher the
birth-rate. But prosperity keeps well in advance of the birth-rate; in
other words, population, though it still _tends_ to, does not actually
_press_ upon the food supply.
If the moral restraint of Malthus be extended so as to include
intermittent moral restraint within the marriage bond, then, under one
or other, or all of his three checks, vice, misery, and moral restraint,
will be found the explanation of the remarkable demographic phenomena of
recent years.
_Misery_ will cover deaths from starvation and poverty, the limitation
of births from abortion due to hardship, from deaths due to improper
food, clothing, and housing; and emigration to avoid hardship.
_Vice_ will cover criminal abortions, limitation of births from
venereal disease, deaths from intemperance, etc., and artificial checks
to conception. Malthus included artificial checks of this kind under
vice (7 ed. of Essay, p. 9.n.), though they have some claim to be
considered under moral restraint. But the question will be referred to
in a later chapter.
_Moral restraint_ will cover those checks to conception, voluntarily
practised in order to escape the burden and responsibility of rearing
children--continence, delayed marriage, and intermittent restraint.
No other checks are directly operative.
Misgovernment and the unequal distribution of wealth and land affect
population indirectly only, and can only act through one or other or all
of the checks already mentioned.
CHAPTER III.
DECLINING BIRTH-RATE.
_Decline of birth-rates rapid and persistent.--Food cost in New
Zealand.--Relation of birth-rate to prosperity before and after
1877.--Neo-Malthusian propaganda.--Marriage rates and fecundity of
marriage.--Statistics of Hearts of Oak Friendly Society.--Deliberate
desire of parents to limit family increase._
It is not the purpose of this work to follow any further the population
problem so far as it relates to deaths and emigration. Attention will be
concentrated on births, and the influences which control their rates.
A rapid and continuous decline in the birth-rate of Northern and Western
Europe, in contravention of all known biological and economic laws, has
filled demographists with amazement.
A table attached here shows the decline very clearly. According to
Parkes ("Practical Hygiene," p. 516), the usual food of the soldier may
be expressed as follows:--
Articles. Daily quantity in
oz. av.
Meat 12.0
Bread 24.0
Potatoes 16.0
Other vegetables 8.0
Milk 3.25
Sugar 1.33
Salt 0.25
Coffee 0.33
Tea 0.16
Total 65.32
Butter 2.4--(Moleschott.)
[Illustration]
The New Zealand Official Year Book gives the following as the average
prices of food for the years mentioned:--
1877 1887 1897 1901
s d. s d. s d. s d.
Bread per lb. 0 2¼ 0 1¾ 0 1½ 0 1½
Beef per lb. 0 5¼ 0 3½ 0 3 0 5
Mutton per lb. 0 4 0 2¾ 0 2 0 4½
Sugar per lb. 0 5¾ 0 3 0 2½ 0 2¾
Tea per lb. 3 0 2 3 2 0 1 10
Butter (fresh) per lb. 1 3 1 0 0 8 0 11
Cheese (col'n'l) per lb. 0 10 0 5¾ 0 6 0 6
Milk per qt. 0 4½ 0 3 0 3 0 3½
The official returns give the average daily wage for artisans for the
years 1877, 1887, 1897, and 1901 as 11s., 10s. 6d., 9s. 9d., and 10s.
3d., respectively.
The weekly rations (the standard food supply for soldiers--Parkes's)
purchaseable by the weekly wages for these years respectively are 11.1,
14.3, 16, and 12.4; _i.e._, the average weekly wage of an artisan in
constant employment in 1877 would purchase rations for 11.1 persons, in
1887 for 14.3 persons, in 1897 for 16 persons, and in 1901 for 12.4
persons.
Up to the year 1877, the birth-rate in England and Wales conformed to
the law of Malthus, and kept pace with increasing prosperity; but, after
that year, and right up to the present time, the nation's prosperity has
gone on advancing at a phenomenal rate _pari passu_ with an equally
phenomenal decline in the number of births per 1000 of the population.
Now, it is a remarkable coincidence that in this very year, 1877, the
Neo-Malthusians began to make their influence felt, and spread amongst
all classes of the people a knowledge of preventive checks to
conception.
People were encouraged to believe that large families were an evil. A
great many, no doubt, had already come to this conclusion; for there is
no more common belief amongst the working classes, at least, than that
large families are a cause of poverty and hardship. And this is even
more true than it was in the days of the Neo-Malthusians, for then child
and women labour was a source of gain to the family, and a poor man's
earnings were often considerably augmented thereby.
The uniform decrease of the birth-rate is a matter of statistics, and
admits of no dispute. It has been least rapid in the German Empire, and
most rapid in New Zealand.
With the declining birth-rate the marriage-rate must be considered.
Malthus would have expected a declining birth-rate to be the natural
result of a declining marriage-rate, and a declining marriage-rate to be
due to the practice of moral restraint, rendered imperative because of
hard times, and a difficulty in obtaining work, wages, and food.
Given the purchasing power of a people, Malthus would have estimated,
according to his laws, the marriage-rate, and, given the marriage-rate,
he would have estimated the birth-rate.
But anticipations in this direction, based on Malthus's laws, have not
been realised. The purchasing power of the people we know has enormously
increased; the marriage-rate has not increased, it has, in fact,
slightly decreased; but the birth-rate per marriage, or the fecundity of
marriage, has decreased in a remarkable degree.
In "Industrial Democracy," by Sydney and Beatrice Webb (p. 637), the
following occurs:--"The Hearts of Oak Friendly Society is the largest
centralised Benefit Society in this country, having now over two hundred
thousand adult male members. No one is admitted who is not of good
character, and in receipt of wages of twenty-four shillings a week or
upwards. The membership consists, therefore, of the artisan and skilled
operative class, with some intermixture of the small shopkeeper, to the
exclusion of the mere labourer. Among its provisions, is the "Lying-in
Benefit," a payment of thirty shillings for each confinement of a
member's wife."
From 1866 to 1880 the proportion of lying-in claims to membership slowly
rose from 21.76 to 24.78 per 100. From 1880 to the present time it has
continuously declined, until now it is only between 14 and 15 per 100.
The following table (from the annual reports of the Committee of
Management of the Hearts of Oak Friendly Society, and those of the
Registrar-General) shows, for each year from 1866 to 1895 inclusive, the
number of members in the Hearts of Oak Friendly Society at the
beginning of the year, the number of those who received Lying-in Benefit
during the year, the percentage of these to the membership at the
beginning of the year, and the birth-rate per thousand of the whole
population of England and Wales.
HEARTS OF OAK FRIENDLY SOCIETY.
Year. Number of Number of Cases Percentage of England and
Members at of lying-in cases paid to Wales: births
the beginning Benefit paid total Membership per 1000 of
of each year. during year. at beginning the total
of year. population.
1866 10,571 2,300 21.76 35.2
1867 12,051 2,853 23.68 35.4
1868 13,568 3,075 22.66 35.8
1869 15,903 3,509 22.07 34.8
1870 18,369 4,173 22.72 35.2
1871 21,484 4,685 21.81 35.0
1872 26,510 6,156 23.22 35.6
1873 32,837 7,386 22.49 35.4
1874 40,740 9,603 23.57 36.0
1875 51,144 13,103 23.66 35.4
1876 64,421 15,473 24.02 36.3
1877 76,369 18,423 24.11 36.0
1878 84,471 20,409 24.16 35.5
1879 90,603 22,057 24.34 34.7
1880 91,986 22,740 24.72 34.2
1881 93,615 21,950 23.45 33.9
1882 96,006 21,860 22.77 33.8
1883 98,873 21,577 21.82 33.5
1884 104,339 21,375 20.51 33.6
1885 105,622 21,277 20.14 32.9
1886 109,074 21,856 20.04 32.8
1887 111,937 20,590 18.39 31.9
1888 115,803 20,244 17.48 31.2
1889 123,223 20,503 16.64 31.1
1890 131,057 20,402 15.57 30.2
1891 141,269 22,500 15.93 31.4
1892 153,595 23,471 15.28 30.5
1893 169,344 25,430 15.02 30.8
1894 184,629 27,000 14.08 29.6
1895 201,075 29,263 14.55 30.4
1896 206,673 30,313 14.67
In this remarkable table the percentage of births to total membership
gradually rose from 21.76, in 1866, to 24.72, in 1880, and then
gradually declined to 14.67 in 1896.
This is a striking instance of the fact that the decrease in the total
birth-rate is due more to a decrease in the fecundity of marriage, than
to a decrease of the marriage-rate.
Mr. Webb adds:--"The well-known actuary, Mr. R.P. Hardy, watching the
statistics year by year, and knowing intimately all the circumstances of
the organisation, attributes this startling reduction in the number of
births of children to these specially prosperous and specially thrifty
artisans entirely to their deliberate desire to limit the size of their
families."
The marriage-rate in England and Wales commenced to decline about three
years before the sudden change in the birth-rate of 1877, and continued
to fall till about 1880, but has maintained a fairly uniform standard
since then, rising slightly in fact, the birth-rate, meanwhile,
descending rapidly.
CHAPTER IV.
MEANS ADOPTED.
_Family Responsibility--Natural fertility undiminished.--Voluntary
prevention and physiological knowledge.--New Zealand
experience.--Diminishing influence of delayed marriage.--Practice of
abortion.--Popular sympathy in criminal cases.--Absence of complicating
issues in New Zealand.--Colonial desire for comfort and happiness._
There is a gradually increasing consensus of opinion amongst
statisticians, that the explanation of the decrease in the number of
births is to be found in the desire of married persons to limit the
family they have to rear and educate, and the voluntary practice of
certain checks to conception in order to fulfil this desire.
It is assumed that there is no diminution in the natural fertility of
either sex. There is no evidence to show that sexual desire is not as
powerful and universal as it ever was in the history of the race; nor is
there any evidence to show that the generative elements have lost any of
their fertilizing and developmental properties and power.
Dr. J.S. Billings in the June number of the _Forum_ for 1893, says that
"the most important factor in the change is the deliberate and
voluntary avoidance or prevention of child-bearing on the part of a
steadily increasing number of married people, who not only prefer to
have but few children, but who know how to obtain their wish."
He further says, "there is no good reason for thinking that there is a
diminished power to produce children in either sex."
M. Arsène Dumont in "Natalite et Democratie" discusses the declining
birth-rate of France, and finds the cause to be the voluntary prevention
of child-bearing on the part of the people, going so far as to say that
where large families occur amongst the peasantry, it is due to ignorance
of the means of prevention.
The birth-rate in none of the civilized countries of the world has
diminished so rapidly as in New Zealand. It was 40.8 in 1880; it was
25.6 in 1900, a loss of 15.2 births per 1000 of the population in 20
years.
There is no known economic cause for this decline. The prosperity of the
Colony has been most marked during these years.
Observation and statistics force upon us the conclusion that voluntary
effort upon the part of married couples to prevent conception is the one
great cause of the low and declining birth-rate. The means adopted are
artificial checks and intermittent sexual restraint, within the marriage
bond, the latter tending to replace the former amongst normal women, as
physiological knowledge spreads.
Delayed marriage still has its influence on the birth-rate, but with
the spread of the same knowledge, that influence is a distinguishing
quantity.
Delayed marriage under Malthusian principles would exert a potent
influence in limiting the births, because early marriages were, and,
under normal circumstances would still be, fruitful.
In the 28th annual report relating to the registration and return of
Births, Marriages and Deaths in Michigan for the year 1894 (p. 125), it
is stated that "The mean number of children borne by females married at
from 15 to 19 years of age inclusive, is 6.76. For the next five year
period of ages, it is 5.32, or a loss of 1.44 children per marriage,
this attending an advance of five years in age at marriage."
Voluntary effort frequently expresses itself in the practice of
abortion. Many monthly nurses degenerate into abortionists and practise
their calling largely, while many women have learned successfully to
operate on themselves.
The extent to which this method of limiting births is practised, and the
absence of public sentiment against it, in fact the wide-spread sympathy
extended to it, may be surmised from the facts that at a recent trial of
a Doctor in Christchurch, New Zealand, for alleged criminal abortion, a
large crowd gathered outside the Court, greeting the accused by a
demonstration in his favour on his being discharged by the jury. A
similar verdict in a similar case in Auckland, New Zealand, was greeted
by applause by the spectators in a crowded Court, which brought down the
indignant censure of the presiding Judge.
In New Zealand there is no oppressive misgovernment, there is no land
question in the sense in which Nitti applies the term, there is no
poverty to account for a declining birth-rate or to confuse the problem.
There is prosperity on every hand, and want is almost unknown. And yet,
fewer and fewer children, in proportion to the population, and in
proportion to the number of marriages, are born into the colony every
year. The only reason that can be given is that the people, though they
want marriage and do marry, do not wish to bear more children than they
can safely, easily, and healthfully support, with a due and
ever-increasing regard for their own personal comfort and happiness.
They have learned that marriage and procreation are not necessarily
inseperable and they practice what they know.
CHAPTER V.
CAUSES OF DECLINING BIRTH-RATE.
_Influence of self-restraint without continence_.--_Desire to limit
families in New Zealand not due to poverty_.--_Offspring cannot be
limited without self-restraint_.--_New Zealand's economic
condition_.--_High standard of general education_.--_Tendency to migrate
within the colony_.--_Diffusion of ideas_.--_Free social migration
between all classes_.--_Desire to migrate upwards_.--_Desire to raise
the standard of ease and comfort_.--_Social status the measure of
financial status_.--_Social attraction of one class to next
below_.--_Each conscious of his limitation_.--_Large families confirm
this limitation_.--_The cost of the family_.--_The cost of maternity.
The craving for ease and luxury_.--_Parents' desire for their children's
social success_.--_Humble homes bear distinguished sons. Large number
with University education in New Zealand_.--_No child labour except in
hop and dairy districts_.--_Hopeless poverty a cause of high
birth-rates_.--_High birth-rates a cause of poverty_.--_Fecundity
depends on capacity of the female to bear children_.
The first or direct cause of this decline in the birth-rate then, is the
inhibition of conception by voluntary means, on the part of those
capable of bearing children.
This inhibition is the result of a desire on the part of both sexes to
limit their families.
Conception is inhibited by means which do not necessitate continence,
but which do necessitate some, and in many cases, a great amount of
self-restraint. But how comes it, that in these days of progress and
prosperity, especially in New Zealand, a desire to limit offspring
should exist amongst its people, and that the desire should be so strong
and so universal?
The desire for this limitation must be strong, for there is absolutely
no evidence that the passion for marriage has lost any of its force; it
must be extensive for the statistics show its results, and the
experience of medical men bears the contention out.
While the marriage passion remains normal, offspring cannot be limited
without the exercise of self-restraint on the part of both parties to
the marriage compact. Artificial means of inhibiting conception, and
intermittent restraint are antagonistic to the sexual instinct, and the
desire for limitation must be strong and mutual to counteract this
instinct within the marriage bond.
The reasons for this strong and very general desire, that marriage
should not result in numerous births must have some foundation. What is
it?
It cannot be poverty. New Zealand's economic experience has been one of
uniform progress and prosperity. There is abundant and fertile land in
these islands where droughts, floods, and famine years, are practically
unknown. Blissards and destructive storms are mysterious terms.
Fluctuations in production take place of course, but not such as to
result in want, to any noticeable extent. There are no extremes of heat
and cold, no extremes of drought and flood, no extremes of wealth and
poverty. The climate is equable, the progress is uniform, the classes
are at peace.
Every natural blessing that a people could desire in a country, is to be
found in New Zealand. Climate, natural fertility, and production,
unrivalled scenery in mountain, lake, and forest, everything to bless
and prosper the present, and inspire hope in the future. Why is it that,
with all this wealth, and with the country still progressing and yet
undeveloped, a desire exists in the heart of the people to limit
families.
The reason is social not economic, if one may contrast the terms.
Take women's attitude to the question first. Our women are well
educated. A state system of compulsory education has placed within the
reach of all a good education, up to what is known as the VI. or VII.
Standard, and only a very few in the colony have been too poor or too
rich to take advantage of it.
Most women can and do read an extensive literature, and to this they
have abundant access, for even small country towns have good libraries.
Alexandra, a little town of 400 inhabitants amongst the Central Otago
mountains, has a public library of several thousand volumes, and the
people take as much pride in this institution as in their school and
church.
People move about from place to place, and it is surprising how small
and even large families keep migrating from one part of the colony to
another. They are always making new friends and acquaintances, and with
these interchanging ideas and information.
Class distinctions have no clear and defined line of demarcation, and
there is a free migration between all the classes; the highest, which is
not very high, is always being recruited from those below, and from even
the lowest, which is not very low.
The highest class is not completely out of sight of any class below it,
and many families are distributed evenly over all the classes. A woman
is the wife of a judge, a sister is the President of a Woman's Union,
another sister is in a shop, and a fourth is married to a labourer.
If one of the poorer (they do not like "lower") class rises in the
social scale, he or she is welcome--if one of the richer (they do not
like "higher") falls, no effort is made by the class they formerly
belonged to to maintain her status in order to save its dignity or
repute.
In other words, there are not the hindrances to free migration between
the various strata of society that obtain in other lands. Not only is
that migration continually taking place, but there are very few who are
not touched by a consciousness of it.
Members of the lower strata, all well educated voters, can give
instances of friends, or relatives, or acquaintances, who are higher up
than themselves--have "made their way," have "risen in society," have
"done well," are "well off." And this consciousness inspires in all but
the very lowest classes an ambition to rise.
Because it is possible to rise, because others rise, the desire to be
migrating upwards soon takes possession of members of all but the lowest
or poorest class, or those heavily ballasted with a large or increasing
family.
The desire to rise in social status is inseparably bound up with the
kindred desire to rise in the standard of comfort and ease.
Social status in New Zealand is, as yet, scarcely distinguishable from
financial status. Those who are referred to as the better classes, are
simply those who have got, or who have made, money. All things,
therefore, are possible to everyone in this democratic colony.
There is thus permeating all classes in New Zealand a spirit of social
rivalry, which shows no tendency to abate nor to be diverted. The social
status of one class exerts an attractive force on the class next below.
But, apart from the influence of status, one class keeps steadily in
view, and persistently strives to attain, the ease, comfort, and even
luxury of the class above it.
Because the members of different grades are so migratory, there are
many in one class known well to members in some class or classes below,
and the ease and luxury which the former enjoy are a constant
demonstration of what is possible to all.
Many who do not acquire wealth enough to make any appreciable difference
in their social status, are able, through family, to improve their
position. Their sons and daughters are given an University education,
and by far the largest number of those entering the learned professions
in New Zealand are the sons of farmers, tradespeople, and retail
dealers.
The great mass of the people in our Colony are conscious of the fact
that their social relations and standard of comfort, or shall one say
standard of ease, are capable of improvement, and the desire to bring
about that improvement is the dominant ambition of their lives.
Anything that stands in the way of this ambition must be overcome. A
large family is a serious check to this ambition, so a large family must
be avoided.
This desire to rise, and this dread too of incurring a responsibility
that will assuredly check individual progress were counselled by
Malthus, and resulted, and he said should result, in delayed marriage,
lest a man, in taking to himself a wife, take also to himself a family
he is unable to support.
But if this man can take to himself a wife without taking to himself a
family, what then?
Men and women, in this Colony at least, have discovered that conformity
to physiological law makes this possible.
A wife does not really add very much to a man's responsibility--it is
the family that adds to his expense, and taxes all his resources. It is
the doctor and the nurse, the food and the clothing, and the education
of the uninvited ones to his home, that use up all his earnings, that
keep him poor, or make him poorer.
Then there is one aspect of the question peculiar to the women
themselves. Women have come to dread maternity. This is part of a
general impatience with pain common to us all. Chloroform, and morphia,
and cocaine, and ethyl chloride have taught us that pain is an evil.
When there was no chance of relieving it, we anæsthetised ourselves and
each other with the thought that it was necessary, it was the will of
Providence, the cry of our nerves for succour.
Now it is an evil, and if we must submit we do so under protest. Women
now engage doctors on condition that chloroform will be administered as
soon as they scream, and they scream earlier in their labour at each
succeeding occasion.
Women are less than ever impressed with the sacredness and nobility of
maternity, and look upon it more and more as a period of martyrdom.
This attitude is in consonance with the crave for ease and luxury that
is beginning to possess us.
It is, however, no new phase in human experience. It characterised all
the civilisations of ancient times, at the height of their prosperity,
and was really the beginning of their decay.
Women with us are more eager to limit families than are their husbands.
They feel the burdens of a large family more. They are often heard to
declare that, with a large family around her, and limited funds at her
disposal with which to provide assistance, a woman is a slave. A large
number think this, and, if there is a way out of the difficulty, they
will follow that way. And they are not content to escape the hardships
of life. They want comforts, and seek them earnestly. With the advent of
comfort, they seek for ease, and, when this is found, they seek for
luxury and social position.
Parents with us have a high ideal of what upbringing should be. Every
parent wants his children to "do better" than himself. If he does not
wish to make a stepping-stone of them, on which to rise to higher social
things, he certainly wishes to give them such a "start in life" as will
give them the best prospects of keeping pace with, or outstripping their
fellows.
The toil and self-denial that many poor parents undergo, in order to
give their children a good education, is almost pathetic, and is not
eclipsed by the enthusiasm for education even in Scotland.
There is a shoemaker in a small digging town in New Zealand, still
toiling away at his last, whose son is a distinguished graduate of our
University, author of several books, and in a high position in his
profession.
There is a grocer in another remote inland village whose son is a doctor
in good practice. There is a baker in a little country district whose
sons now hold high positions in the medical profession, one at home and
the other abroad.
These facts are widely known amongst the working classes, and inspire
them with a spirit of rivalry.
With regard to the general education of the people, the
Registrar-General says, (New Zealand Official Year Book for 1898, page
164) "In considering the proportions of the population at different age
periods, the improvement in education is even more clearly proved. It is
found that, in 1896, of persons at the age-period 10-15 years, 98.73 per
cent, were able to read and write, while 0.65 per cent. could merely
read, and 0.62 per cent. were unable to read. The proportion who could
not read increased slowly with each succeeding quinquennial period of
age, until at 50-55 years it stood at 4.04 per cent. At 75 to 80 years
the proportion was 7.05, and at 80 and upwards it advanced to 8.07.
Similarly, the proportion of persons who could read only increased from
0.65 at 10-15 years to 3.66 at the period 50-55 years, and again to 9.74
and upwards. The better education of the people at the earlier stages is
thus exhibited."
Further evidences of improved education will be found in the portion of
his work relating to marriages, where it is shown that the proportion of
persons in every thousand married, who signed by mark, has fallen very
greatly since 1881. The figures for the sexes in the year 1881 were
32.04 males, and 57.04 females, against 6.19 males and 7.02 females in
1895.
For the position of teacher in a public school in New Zealand, at a
salary of £60 a year, there were 14 female applicants, 10 of whom held
the degree of M.A., and the other four that of B.A.
The number of children, 5-15 years of age, in New Zealand, was estimated
as on 31st December, 1902, at 178,875. The number of children, 7-13
years of age (compulsory school age), was estimated as on 31st December,
1902, at 124,986. The attendance at schools, public and private, during
the fourth quarter of 1902, was European 150,332, Maoris and half-castes
5,573. If children spend their useful years of child life at school,
they can render little or no remunerative service to their parents.
Neither boys or girls can earn anything till over the age of 14 years.
Our laws prohibit child labour.
In New Zealand, children, therefore, while they remain at home, are a
continual drain on the resources of the bread-winner. More is expected
from parents than in many other countries.
At our public schools children are expected to be well clad; and it is
quite the exception, even in the poorest localities of our large cities,
to see children attending school with bare feet.
During child-life, nothing is returned to the parent to compensate for
the outlay upon the rearing and educating of children.
If a boy, by reason of a good education, soon, say, at from 14-18 years,
is enabled to earn a few shillings weekly, it is very readily absorbed
in keeping him dressed equally well with other boys at the same office
or work.
An investment in children is, therefore, from a pecuniary point of view,
a failure. There are, perhaps, two exceptions in New Zealand--in dairy
farming in Taranaki, where the children milk outside school hours; and
in the hop districts of Nelson, where, during the season, all the
children in a family become hop-pickers, and a big cheque is netted when
the family is a large one.
Quite apart from considerations of self, parents declare that the fewer
children they have, the better they can clothe and educate them; and
they prefer to "do well" for two or three, than to "drag up" twice or
three times as many in rags and ignorance.
Clothing is dear in New Zealand. The following is a labourer's account
of his expenditure. He is an industrious man, and his wife is a thrifty
Glasgow woman. It is drawn very fine. No. 7 is less than he would have
to pay in the city by two or three shillings a week for a house of
similar size. No. 9 is rather higher than is usual with Benefit
Societies, which average about sixteen shillings a quarter.
WEEKLY EXPENSES OF FAMILY COMPRISING FIVE CHILDREN AND PARENTS.
Per Week.
£ s. d.
1. Groceries and milk 0 15 0
2. Coal and light 0 4 0
3. Butcher 0 4 0
4. Baker 0 4 0
5. Boots, with repairing 0 2 6
6. Clothing and underclothing 0 5 0
7. Rent in suburbs 0 10 0
8. Sundries 0 2 0
9. Benefit Society 0 2 0
-----------
Weekly total £2 8 6
Most young people make a good start in New Zealand. Even men-servants
and maid-servants want for nothing. They dress well, they go to the
theatres and music-halls, they have numerous holidays, and enjoy them by
excursions on land or sea. It is when they marry, and mouths come
crying to be filled, that they become poor, and the struggle of life
begins.
In our Colony, there is no more prevalent or ingrained idea in the minds
of our people than that large families are a cause of poverty.
A high birth-rate in a family certainly is a cause of poverty. Many
children do not enable a father to earn higher wages, nor do they enable
a mother to render the bread-winner more assistance; while in New
Zealand, especially, compulsory education and the inhibition of
child-labour prevent indigent parents from procuring the slight help
that robust boys and girls of 10 years of age, or so, are often able to
supply.
These considerations go far to explain the desire on the part of married
couples to limit offspring; and, if there were no means at their
disposal of limiting the number of children born to them, a great
decline in the marriage-rate would be the inevitable result of the
existing conditions of life, and the prevalent ideas of the people.
Hopeless poverty appears to be a cause of a high birth-rate, and this
seems to be due to the complete abandonment by the hopelessly poor of
all hope of attaining comfort and success.
Marriage between two who are hopelessly poor is extremely rare with us.
Each is able to provide for his or herself at least, and in all
probability the husband is able to provide comfortably for both.
If he is not, the wife can work, and their joint earnings will keep them
from want. But, if one of the partners has not only to give herself up
to child-bearing, and thus cease to earn, but also bring another into
the home that will monopolise all her time, attention, and energy, and a
good deal of its father's earnings, how will they fare?
If a man's wages has to be divided between two, then between three, then
four, six, eight, ten, while all the time that wages is not increasing,
have we not a direct cause of poverty, and, moreover, is not that cause
first in time and importance?
Later on in the history of the family their poverty will become a cause
of an increase in the children born to them. At first they may struggle
to prevent an increase, but, when they are in the depths of hopeless
poverty, they will abandon themselves to despair.
Could they have had born to them only one, or two, or three, during
their early married life, they might not only have escaped want, but
later in life may have had others born to them, without either their
little ones or themselves feeling the pinch of poverty.
It must be remembered in this connection that fecundity and sexual
activity are not convertible terms.
It is certainly not true to say that the greater the fecundity of the
people the stronger their sexual instinct, or the greater the sexual
exercise.
A high fecundity does not depend on an inordinate sexual activity.
Fecundity depends on the child-bearing capacity of each female, and a
sexual union at an appropriate time once in two years between puberty
and the catamenia is compatible with the highest possible fecundity.
It would be quite illogical, and inconsistent with physiological facts,
to aver that, were the poor less given to indulge the pleasures of
sense, their fecundity would be modified in an appreciable degree.
CHAPTER VI.
ETHICS OF PREVENTION.
_Fertility the law of life.--Man interprets and controls this
law.--Marriage law necessary to fix paternal responsibility.--Malthus's
high ideal.--If prudence the motive, continence and celibacy violate no
law.--Post-nuptial intermittent restraint.--Ethics of prevention judged
by consequences.--When procreation is a good and when an
evil.--Oligantrophy.--Artificial checks are physiological sins._
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He
him, male and female created He them, and God blessed them and God said
unto them, 'Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the
earth.'"--(Genesis i., 27-28). This commandment was repeated to Noah and
his sons.
Whether Moses was recording the voice of God, or interpreting a
physiological law is immaterial to this aspect of a great social
question. The fact remains that in obedience to a great law of life, all
living things are fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, and
multiplication in a state of nature is limited only by space and food.
In a state of nature, reproduction is automatic, and only in this state
is this physiological law, or this divine command obeyed.
The reason of man intervenes, and interprets, and modifies this law.
A community of men becomes a social organism, calls itself a State, and
limits the law of reproduction. It decrees that the sexes shall, if they
pair, isolate themselves in pairs, and live in pairs whether inclined to
so live or not.
If the State has a right so to interpret and limit the law of
reproduction, a principle in human affairs is established, and its
decree that individuals shall not mate before a certain age, or not mate
at all, is only a further application of the same principle. By the law
of reproduction a strong instinct, second only in force and universality
to the law of self-preservation, is planted in the sexes, and upon a
blind obedience to this force, the continuity of the race depends.
The tendency in the races of history has been to over-population, or to
a population beyond the food supply, and there is probably no race known
to history that did not at some one period of its rise or fall suffer
from over-population.
States have mostly been concerned, therefore, with restraining or
inhibiting the natural reproductive instinct of their subjects through
marriage laws which protect the State, by fixing paternal
responsibility. There were strong reasons why a State should not be
over-populated, and only one reason why it should not be
under-populated. That one reason was the danger of annihilation from
invasion.
Sparta was said to have suffered thus, because of under-population, and
passed a law encouraging large families. Alexander encouraged his
soldiers to intermarry with the women of conquered races, in order to
diminish racial differences and antagonism, and Augustus framed laws for
the discouragement of celibacy, but no law has ever been passed
decreeing that individuals must mate, or if they do mate that they shall
procreate.
Malthus, the great and good philanthropist of Harleybury, a great
moralist and Christian clergyman, urged that it was people's duty not to
mate and procreate until they had reasonable hope of being able easily
to rear, support, and educate the normal family of four, and, if that
were impossible, not to mate at all. As a Christian clergyman, Malthus
did not interpret the Divine command apart from the consequences of its
literal acceptance.
"Be fruitful," meant to Malthus reproduce your kind,--that implied not
only bringing babies into the world, but rearing them up to healthy,
robust, and prosperous manhood, with every prospect of continuing the
process.
"Multiply and replenish the earth" as a command to Noah, meant in the
mind of the Rector of Harleybury, "People the earth with men after your
own image."
Very little care would be required in Noah's time, with his fine
alluvial flats, and sparse population, but in Malthus's time the command
could not be fully carried out without labour, self-development, and
"moral restraint."
The physiological law is simple and blind, taking no cognisance of the
consequences, or the quality of the offspring produced. The divine
command is complex. It embodies the reproductive instinct, but restrains
and guides it in view of ultimate consequences.
So much for the views and teaching of Malthus. To him no ethical
standard was violated in preventing offspring by protracted continence,
or lifelong celibacy, provided the motive was the inability so to
provide for a family as to require no aid from the state. And it is
difficult to escape this conclusion. There is no ethical, Christian, or
social law, that directs a man or woman to procreate their kind if they
cannot, or have reasonable grounds to think they cannot, support their
offspring without aid from others.
There can be, therefore, no just law that decrees that men or women
shall marry under such circumstances. In fact most philanthropists think
they violate a social and ethical law if they do marry.
But, if with Paul, they resolve that it is better to marry than to burn,
is there any law that can or should prevent them selecting the
occasions of their union, with a view to limiting fertility.
Abstention is the voluntary hindrance of a desire, when that desire is
strongest in both sexes; and as such it limits happiness, and is in
consequence an evil _per se_. A motive that will control this desire
must be a strong one; such a motive is not necessarily bad. It may be
good or evil.
There can be no essential ethical difference between constant
continence, prior to marriage, and intermittent continence subsequent to
marriage, both practices having a similar motive.
If post nuptial restraint with a view to limiting offspring is wrong,
restraint from marriage with the same motive is wrong.
If delayed marriage in the interest of the individual and the State is
right, marriage with intermittent restraint is in the same interest, and
can as easily be defended.
The ethics of prevention by restraint must be judged by its
consequences. If unrestrained procreation will place children in a home
where the food and comfort are adequate to their healthful support and
development, then procreation is good,--good for the individual,
society, and the State.
If the conditions necessary to this healthful support and development,
can by individual or State effort be provided for all children born, it
is the duty of the individual and of the State to make that effort.
All persons of fair education and good intelligence know what those
conditions are, and if they procreate regardless of their absence, that
procreation is an evil, and prevention by restraint is the contrary
virtue.
It is not suggested, however, that all those who prevent, without or
within the marriage bond, do so from this worthy motive, nor is it
suggested that all those who prevent are not extravagant in their demand
for luxurious conditions for themselves and for their children.
Many require not merely the conditions necessary to the healthful
development of each and every child they may bear, but they demand that
child-bearing shall not entail hardships nor the prospect of hardships,
shall not involve the surrender of any comfort or luxury, nor the
prospect of any such surrender.
Whatever doubt may exist in the minds of moralists and philanthropists
as to the ethics of prevention in the face of poverty, there can be no
doubt that prevention by those able to bear and educate healthy
offspring, without hardship, is a pernicious vice degrading to the
individual, and a crime against society and the State.
Aristotle called this vice "oliganthropy." Amongst the ancients it was
associated with self-indulgence, luxury, and ease. It was the result of
self-indulgence, but it was the cause of mental and moral anæmia, and
racial decay.
So far in this chapter prevention has been dealt with only in so far as
it is brought about by ante-nuptial and post-nuptial restraint.
Artificial checks were first brought prominently before the notice of
the British Public under the garb of social virtue, about the year 1877
by Mrs. Annie Besant and Mr. Charles Bradlaugh.
These checks to conception, though they are very largely used, can
hardly be defended on physiological grounds. Every interference with a
natural process must be attended, to some extent at least, with physical
injury. There is not much evidence that the injury is great, but in so
far as an interference is unnatural, it is unhealthy, and there is much
evidence to show that many of the checks advocated and used, are not
only harmful but are quite useless for the purpose for which they are
sold.
It will be conceded by most, no doubt, that with those capable of
bearing healthy children, and those unable to rear healthy ones when
born, prevention by restraint, ante-nuptial or post nuptial, is a social
virtue, while prevention under all other circumstances is a social vice.
Happiness has been defined as the surplus of pleasure over pain. What
constitutes pleasure and what pain varies in the different stages of
racial and individual development. In civilized man we have the
pleasures of mind supplementing and in some cases replacing the
pleasures of sense. We talk, therefore, of the higher pleasures--the
pleasures of knowledge and learning, of wider sympathies and love, of
the contemplation of extended prosperity and concord, of hope for
international fraternity and peace, and for a life beyond the grave.
Happiness to the highly civilized will consist, therefore, of the
surplus of these pleasures over the pains of their negation.
Self-preservation is the basal law of life, and to preserve one's-self
in happiness, the completest preservation, for happiness promotes
health, and health longevity.
The first law of living nature then is to preserve life and the
enjoyment of it, and the pleasures sought, to increase the sum of
happiness will depend on the sentiments and emotions, _i.e._, on the
faculties of mind that education and experience have developed, in the
race, or in the individual.
My first thought is for myself, and my duty is to increase the sum of my
happiness. But the mental state we call happiness is relative to the
presence or absence of this state in others. Even amongst the lower
animals, misery and distress in one of the flock militate against the
happiness of the others. In a highly developed man true happiness is
impossible in the presence of pain and misery in others and _vice
versa_; happiness is contagious and flows to us from the joy of others.
If the happiness of others then is so essential to my own happiness, I
am fulfilling the first law of life and ministering to my own
preservation in health and happiness by using my best endeavours to
promote this state in others. My material comfort too depends largely on
the labour, and love, and the contribution of others in the complex
industrial system and division of labour of the higher civilisations.
Not only my happiness and health but my very existence depends on the
good-will and toil of others. Thus from a purely egoistic standpoint, my
first duty to myself is to increase the happiness in others, and,
therefore, my first duty to myself becomes my highest duty to society.
My duty to my child is comprehended in my duty to society, _i.e._, to
others. My duty to others is to increase the sum of the happiness of
others, and bringing healthy children into the world not only creates
beings capable of experiencing and enjoying pleasures, but adds to the
sum of social happiness, by increasing the number of social units
capable of rendering service to others.
The next great law of life is the law of race preservation. This law
comprises the instinct to reproduction and the instinct of parental
love. The first and chief function of these instincts in the animal
economy is the perpetuation of the race. The preservation of self
implies and comprehends the preservation of the race.
My first duty to myself is to preserve myself in health and happiness;
but this is best fulfilled and realized in labouring for the health and
happiness of others. If this be the universal law, I also am the
recipient of others' care, therefore probably better tended and
preserved. I save my life by losing it in others.
My second duty, though nominally to Society, is in reality to myself,
and it is to preserve myself by preserving the race to which I belong.
Self-preservation therefore, is the first law of life, race preservation
the second or subsidiary law.
To fulfil this second law, nature has placed on every normal healthy man
and woman the sacred duty of reproducing their kind. Reproduction as a
physiological process promotes, both directly and indirectly, the
health, happiness and longevity of healthy men and women.
Statistics confirm the popular opinion "that the length of life, to the
enjoyment of which a married person may look forward, is greater than
that of the unmarried, both male and female at the same
age."--(Coghlan).
It is a familiar observation that the mothers of large families of ten
and even twice that number are not less healthy nor shorter lived
because of the children they have borne. Pregnancy is a stimulus to
vitality. Because another life has to be supported, all the vital
powers are invigorated and rise to the occasion--the circulation
increases, the heart enlarges in response to the extra work, and the
assimilative powers of the body are greatly accelerated. During
lactation also, the same extra vital work done is a stimulus to a
physiological activity which is favourable to health and longevity. The
expectancy of life in women is greater than in men all through life, the
difference during the child-bearing period of life being about 2.2 years
in favour of women.
Statistics and physicians from their observation agree in this, that the
bearing of children by normal women, so far from being injurious to
health, is as healthful, stimulating, and invigorating a function as the
blooming of a flower, or the shedding of fruit, and a mother is no worse
for the experience of maternity than is the plant or the tree for the
fruit it bears.
The supreme law of society is the law of race-preservation, and the
infraction of this law is a social crime. One's duty to society is a
higher duty than to one's-self, but the lower duty comes first in our
present stage of racial evolution. Instinct prompts to the one,
reason--a higher and later, but less respected, faculty--prompts to the
other.
But it can be shown that from an egoistic standpoint my duty to the
State in this regard is my highest duty to myself.
The parental sacrifice necessary in rearing the normal number of
children is infinitesimal compared with the parental advantage.
Parental love is a passion as well as an instinct in normal men and
women, and the full play of this passion in its natural state is
productive of the greatest happiness.
Vice may restrain, replace, or smother it, but nothing else can damage
or adulterate this powerful passion in the human heart.
Low level selfishness, love of low level luxury, diseased imaginings,
and unreasonable dreads and fears, are some of the forms of vice that
smother this noble passion.
The pursuit of happiness and the higher forms of selfishness would
naturally point to parentage.
The ectasy of parental love, the sweet response from little ones that
rises as the fragrance of lovely flowers, self-realization in the
comfort and joy of family life, the parental pride in the contemplation
of effulgent youth, the sympathetic partnership in success, the repose
of old age surrounded by filial manhood and womanhood, all go to make a
surplus of pleasure over pain, that no other way of life can possibly
supply.
What is the alternative?
To miss all this and live a barren life and a loveless old age. Perhaps
to bear a child, that, for the need of the educative, elevating
companionship of family mates is consumed by self, inheriting that
vicious selfishness, which he by his birth defeated, and finding all the
forces of nature focussed on his defect, like a pack of hounds that turn
and rend an injured mate.
Or a family of one, after years of parental care and love, education and
expense, dies or turns a rake, and the canker of remorse takes his place
in the broken hearts.
Nature's laws are not broken with impunity--as a great Physician has
said, "She never forgives and never forgets."
Self-preservation and race-preservation together constitute the law of
life, just as Conservation of Matter and Conservation of Energy
constitute the Law of Substance in Haeckels Monistic Philosophy, and the
severest altruism will permit man to follow his highest self-interest in
obedience to these laws. It is only a perverted and vicious
self-interest that would tempt him to infraction.
That the vice of oliganthropy is growing amongst normal and healthy
people is a painful and startling fact. In New Zealand the prevailing
belief is that a number of children adds to the cares and
responsibilities of life more than they add to its joys and pleasures,
and many have come to think with John Stuart Mill, that a large family
should be looked on with the same contempt as drunkenness.
CHAPTER VII.
WHO PREVENT.
_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._
It has been sufficiently demonstrated in preceding chapters, that the
birth-rate has been, and is still rapidly declining. It has been sought
to prove that this decline is chiefly due to voluntary means taken by
married people to limit their families, and that the desire for this
limitation is the result of our social system.
The important question now arises. Is the desire uniform through all
classes of Society, and is the practice of prevention uniform through
all classes?
In other words, is the decline in the birth-rate due to prevention in
one class more than in another, and if so which?
Experience and statistics force us to the startling conclusion, that the
birth-rate is declining amongst the best classes of citizens, and
remains undisturbed amongst the worst.
Now the first-class responsible for the decline includes those who do
not marry, and those who marry late. The Michigan vital statistics for
1894 (p. 125) show that the mean number of children to each marriage at
the age of 15-19 years is 6.75, at the age of 20-25 years it is 5.32, a
difference of 1.44 in favour of delayed marriage for a period of five
years.
In New Zealand the marriage rate has gone up from 5.97 per thousand
persons living in 1888 to 7.67 in 1900.
This class includes clerks with an income of £100 and under,--a large
number with £150, and all misogynists with higher incomes.
It includes labourers with £75 a year and under, and many who receive
£100.
Their motives for avoiding marriage are mostly prudential.
Those who abstain from marriage for prudential reasons are as a rule
good citizens. They are workers who realise their responsibilities in
life, and shrink from undertaking duties which they feel they cannot
adequately perform. By far the largest class who practice prevention,
consists of those who marry, and have one or two children, and limit
their families to that number, for prudential, health, or selfish
reasons.
These too are as a rule good citizens, and there are two qualities that
so distinguish them. First, their prudence; they have no wish to burden
the State with the care or support of their children. Their fixed
determination is to support and educate them themselves, and they set
themselves to the work with thriftiness and forethought.
In order to do this, however, it is essential that the family is limited
to one, two, or three, as the case may be, and before it is too late,
preventive measures are resorted to.
The second quality that distinguishes them as good citizens is their
self-control. Every preventive measure in normal individuals implies a
certain amount of self-restraint, and in proportion as prudential
motives are strong is the self-imposed restraint easy and effective.
The existence of these two qualities, prudence and self-control, is a
very important factor in human character, and upon their presence and
prevalence in its units depend the progress and stability of society.
But the birth-rate varies in an inverse ratio with these qualities. In
those communities or sections of communities, where these qualities are
conspicuous, will the birth-rate be correspondingly low.
There is another class of people that has strong desires to keep free
from the cares and expense of a large family. These are, too, good
citizens and belong to good stock. They are those possessed of ambition
to rise socially, politically, or financially, and they are a numerous
body in New Zealand.
They are quite able to support and educate a fairly large family, but as
children are hindrances, and increase the anxieties, the
responsibilities and the expense, they must be limited to one or two.
There is still another class that consists of the purely selfish and
luxurious members of society, who find children a bother, who have to
sacrifice some of the pleasures of life in order to rear them.
Now all those who prevent have some rational ground for prevention, and
at least are possessed of sufficient self-control to give effect to
their wish. They include the best citizens and the best stock, and from
them would issue, if the reproductive faculty were unrestrained, the
best progeny.
One grave aspect of this limitation is that, as a rule, the family is
limited after the first one or two are born. The small families, say of
two, are born when the parents are both young, and carefully compiled
statistics prove that these are not the best offspring a couple can
produce. Those born first in wedlock, are shorter and not so well
developed as those born later in married life, when parents are more
matured.
If it is substantially true, that the decline in the birth-rate is due
to voluntary prevention, and that prevention implies prudence and
self-control, it is safe to conclude that those in whom these qualities
are absent or least conspicuous, will be the most prolific.
But those in whom these qualities are absent or least conspicuous are
our worst citizens, and, therefore, our worst citizens are the most
prolific. Observation and statistics lead to the same conclusion.
Amongst the very poor in crowded localities, the passion for marriage
early asserts itself.
Its natural enemies are prudence and a consciousness of responsibility,
and these suggest restraint. But prudence and restraint are not the
common attributes of the very poor. Poverty makes people reckless, they
live from hour to hour as the lower animals do. They satisfy their
desires as they arise, whether it be the desire for food or the desire
of sex.
The very poor includes amongst its numbers, the drunkard, the criminal,
the professional pauper, and the physically and mentally defective.
The drunkard is not distinguished by his prudence, nor by his
self-restraint. In fact the alcohol which he imbibes paralyses what
self-control he has, and excites through an increased circulation in his
lower brain-centres an unnatural sexual desire. What hope is there of
the drunkard curtailing his family by self-restraint?
Dr. Billings says, (Forum, June 1893) "So far as we have data with
regard to the use of intoxicating liquors, fertility seems greatest in
those countries and amongst those classes where they are most freely
used."
Neither is the criminal blessed with the important attributes of
prudence and self-control. They are conspicuous by their absence in him.
In all defectives, in epileptics, idiots, the physical deformed, the
insane, and the criminal, the prudence and self-restraint necessary to
the limitation of families is either partially or entirely absent.
To the poor in crowded localities, with limited room-space and
insanitary surroundings, effective self-restraint is more difficult than
in any other class of society.
In all defectives the sexual instinct is as strong, if not stronger,
than in the normal, and they have not that interest in life, and regard
for the future that suggest restraint, nor have they the power to
practise it though prudence were to guide them.
The higher checks to population, as they exist among the better classes
of people, do not obtain amongst the defectives taken as a class.
Vice and misery are more active checks amongst the very poor, and
abortion is practised to a very considerable extent, but the appalling
fact remains, that the birth-rate of the unfit goes on undisturbed,
while the introduction of higher checks amongst the normal classes has
led to a marked decline, more marked than at first sight appears. The
worst feature of the problem, however, is not so much the disproportion
in the numbers born to the normal and the abnormal respectively, but the
fact that the defectives propagate their kind.
The defectives, whose existence and whose liberty constitute the
greatest danger to the State, are the intermittent inhabitants of our
lunatic asylums, prisons, and reformatories.
There is one defect common to all these, and that is defective
inhibition.
All human activity is the result of two forces, motor impulses tending
to action, and inhibition tending to inertia.
The lower animals have strong motor impulses constantly exploding and
expressing themselves in great activity, offensive, defensive,
self-preservative, and procreative, being restrained only by the
inhibitive forces of their conditions and environment.
Children have strong motor impulses, which are at first little
controlled. Inhibition is a late development and is largely a result of
education.
If the motor impulses remain strong, or become stronger in the presence
of development with exercise, while inhibition remains weak, we have a
criminal.
Inhibition is the function performed by the highest and last-formed
brain-cells. These brain cells may be undeveloped either from want of
exercise, that is, education, or from hereditary weakness, or, having
been developed may have undergone degeneration, under the influence of
alcohol, or from hereditary or acquired disease.
Motor impulses, as the springs of action, are common to all animals. In
the lower animals inhibition is external, and never internal or
subjective. In man it may be internal or external.
It is internal or subjective in those whose higher brain centres are
well developed and normal. Their auto-inhibition is such that all their
motor impulses are controlled and directed in the best interests of
society.
It is external only in those whose higher brain centres are either
undeveloped or diseased. These constitute the criminal classes. Their
motor impulses are unrestrained. They offer a low or reduced resistance
to temptation.
Weak or absent resistance in the face of a normal motor impulse whose
expression injuriously affects another, is crime, and a criminal is one
whose power of resistance to motor impulses has been reduced by disease,
hereditary or acquired, or is absent through arrested development.
A confirmed criminal is one in whom the frequent recurrence of an
unrestrained impulse injurious to others has induced habit.
Auto-inhibition is defective or absent, and society must in her own
interest provide external restraint, and this we call law.
Criminals are, therefore, mental defectives, and may be defined for
sociological purposes as those in whom legal punishment for the second
time, for the same offence, has failed to act as a deterrent.
M. Boies, in "Prisoners and Paupers," says that conviction for the third
time for an offence, is proof of hereditary criminal taint.
The existence of motor impulses in the human animal is normal. They vary
in strength and force. We cannot eradicate, we can only control them.
They may become less assertive under the constant control of a highly
cultivated inhibition, but it is only in this way that they can be
affected at all. They may be controlled, either by the individual
himself or by the State. Our reformatories are peopled by young persons
whose distinguishing characteristic is that inhibition is undeveloped or
defective. This defect may be due to want of education, but it is more
often hereditary.
Two things only can be done for them. This faculty of inhibition can be
trained by education, or external restraint can be provided by law.
But the distinguishing characteristic of all defectives, within or
without our public institutions, is defective inhibition,--they are
unable to control the spontaneous impulses that continually arise, and
which may indeed be normal.
Impulses may be abnormal from hereditary predisposition, as _e.g._ the
impulse to drink, but only through strengthening inhibition can these
impulses be controlled,--their existence must be accepted.
But whether the defect is an abnormal impulse, or a normal impulse
abnormally strong, or an abnormally weak or defective inhibition, the
condition is hereditary, and such defectives propagate their kind.
It has been shown that they are more fertile than any other classes
because of the very defect that makes them a danger to society.
The defective restraint that allows them to commit offences against
person and property, also allows their procreative impulse unrestrained
activity.
Defectives, therefore, are not only fertile, but they propagate their
kind, and a few examples will serve to show to some extent the
fertility, and to an enormous extent the hereditary tendencies, of the
unfit.
CASE NO. 1, p. 49.
J. E----'s FAMILY.
M M F
----------+---------------------------+----------------+--------------
| | |
A suicide, Aet. 56 Died of cancer of | Died in a fit,
Married. No issue stomach, Aet. 66 | Aet. 54
|
----+---------+----------+----------+-----------+------+----+--------+
| | | | | | |
M M F F F M M
Died of Died of Died of Died of Died of Healthy, |
cancer of convulsions consumption consumption, consumption, has |
stomach, at | | Aet 16 seven |
Aet. 58 13 weeks | | children |
| | | |
Left five Married several Married several M
children years. years. Epiletic, twice
No issue No issue insane, testes in
abdomen. Married.
No children
CASE NO. 2, p. 108.
K. S----'s FAMILY.
M F
-----------------------+-------------------------
Epileptic | Had sister insane
|
----+------------+---------+--+------------+--------------+------
| | | | |
M F M F F
Epileptic. Epileptic Idiot, Sane as yet. Insane. Suicidal,
Dead. No and insane. impotent Nine children, incurable
issue Dead. No some imbecile No issue
issue
CASE No. 3, p. 125.
Father, a drunkard
|
Son
|
A drunkard, disgustingly | on his wedding day.
|
----+----------+----------+----------+--+-------+-----------+--------+
| | | | | | |
Died of Died of Idiot of Suicidal. Peculiar Repeatedly |
convulsions convulsions 22 years A dement and insane |
of age irritable |
Nervous and
depressed
CASE No. 4, p. 137.
M
Died | mad
|
M__________M_____|_________M__________M
| | | |
Imbecile Irritable Died of brain disease
______________________|___________________________________
| | | | | | | | | |
F. Imbecile Epileptic Epileptic 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
All seven died in convulsions
CASE No. 5, p. 137.
F. a suicide
|_______________________________F____________________F
M Insane
|
Insane
______________|________________________________________
| | |
Excitable Dull Epileptic
Imbecile
CASE No. 6, p. 166.
M________________F
Mute | Normal
___________|__________
M| |F
Mute. No issue Normal__________________M
| Normal
_________________________|______________________
F F M |F
Mute Mute Normal Normal
|
M
Mute
CASE No. 7, p. 231.
J.G. A----'s FAMILY HISTORY.
PATERNAL SIDE. MATERNAL SIDE.
F /
i | Grandfather, a drunkard Grandmother, "odd"
r | Grandmother, normal Grandfather, normal
s |
G t \
e
n S / Uncle, a drunkard Uncle, epileptic
e e | Uncle, a drunkard Uncle, rheumatic, totally
r c | crippled and his daughter also
a o | Uncle, an epileptic Uncle, rheumatic
t n | Aunt, rheumatic
i d \ Father, excitable & irritable Mother, died in asylum
o
n T / Daughter, has had rheumatism and has had heart disease
s h | Son, now insane
i | Son, died a few days old of convulsions
r | Son, now a chronic maniac in an asylum
d | Daughter, suicidal, melancholic; died in an asylum. No issue.
\ Family now extinct.
* * * * *
CASE No. 8, p. 303.
S. M----'s FAMILY.
M F
-----------------------------------------
Asthmatic | Somewhat weak-minded
|
|
---------------------------------------------------------------------
1 23456 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
| | | | | | | | |
Healthy Died in Drowned Epilepsy Healthy Idiot Died in Healthy |
infancy infancy |
in in Scrofulous
convulsions convulsions
_The above diagrammatic histories of eight families are taken from Dr.
Strahan's "Marriage and Disease."_
CHAPTER VIII.
THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE FIT IN RELATION TO THE STATE.
_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_.
The multiplication of the fit is of the first importance to the State.
It supplies competent producers and courageous defenders, and the more
of these, consistent with space and food (using these terms in their
fullest significance), the better off the State.
If healthy happy citizens are the State's ideal, then limitation of
population well within the space and food will be encouraged. If
national wealth and prosperity in its material aspect are the State's
ideal, the harder the population presses on the means of subsistence the
sooner will that ideal be realised. For it cannot be denied, that the
greater the stress and hardship in life, the more strenuous the effort
put forth to obtain a foothold. The greater the competition the keener
the effort, and the higher the accomplishment; while to ensure an
adequate supply of labour in time of great demand there must always be a
surplus.
The waste of life must always be greater; but what of that! National
wealth is the ideal--the maximum amount of production. Child labour, and
women labour, are called in to fill the national granaries, though
misery and death attend the process.
If this be the ideal of the State, life is of less value than the
product of labour, for it can be more easily and readily replaced.
But the ideal of the perfect state is not wealth but the robust
happiness of its members.
The happiness of its members is best promoted by the maximum increase in
its numbers, consistent with ample space and food. With ample space and
food multiplication works automatically, being kept up to the limit of
space and food by the procreative instinct.
If it can be shown that multiplication is not sufficiently stimulated by
this instinct, then it must be concluded that, _in the minds of the
citizens_ the space and food are not ample.
In New Zealand the procreative impulse does not keep multiplication at
an equal pace with the apparent supply of food and space, and this is
due, as has been shown, to the fact that our citizens are not satisfied
that the supply _is_ ample.
They have come to enlarge the definition of "food," and this term now
includes luxuries easily obtainable for themselves and their families.
But the luxuries of life and living can only be easily obtained when
individual effort to obtain them is unhampered. Every burden which a man
has to bear (only the best are here referred to,--the fit members of the
State) limits his power to provide for himself, and any he may bring
into the world.
If the State decrees that a citizen shall support himself, his mate, and
his progeny, well and good,--if he has no other burden to bear, no other
responsibility, he knows exactly where he is and what he has to do, and
directs his energies and controls his impulses, and enlarges his desires
to suit his tastes and purposes.
But if the State decrees that a citizen shall not only support all for
whose existence he is responsible, but also all those unable to support
themselves, born into the world in increasing numbers as congenital
defectives, and manufactured in the world by legalised drinking saloons,
and by pauperising charitable aid and benevolent institutions, then our
self-respecting right-respecting citizen must decide whether he will
forego the luxury and ease that he may enjoy, and rear the normal
family, or curtail his own progeny, and support the army of defectives
thrown upon society by the State-encouraged fertility of the unfit.
It has already been shown, that in this colony the best fit to multiply
are ceasing to do so, because of a desire to attain a social and
financial stability that will protect them and their dependents from
want or the prospect of want. There is every reason to believe, that
when this stability is assured the normal family soon follows.
The love of luxurious idleness and a passion for excitement, which were
typical of the voluntarily barren women of ancient Rome, have little
place with us, as a cause of limited nativity.
Men and women reason out, that they cannot bear all the burdens that the
State imposes upon them, support an increasing army of paupers, and
lunatics and defectives, and non-producers, and that luxuriously, and at
the same time incur the additional burden of rearing a large family.
Let us examine these burdens, and see if the complaint of our best stock
is justified.
The amount raised by taxation in New Zealand (including local rates)
during the year 1902-03, amounted per head of population (excluding
Maories) to £5 4s. 7d. The bread-winners in New Zealand number according
to official returns, 340,230, and the total rates and taxes collected
for the year 1902-03 amounted to £4,174,787 or £12 5s. 4d. for each
bread-winner for the year.
On March 31st, 1901 (the last census date) there were 23.01 persons per
thousand of population over 15 years of age, unable to work from
sickness, accident and infirmity. Of these 12.72 were due to sickness
and accident, and 10.29 to "specified infirmities."
The proportion of those suffering from sickness and accident in 1874 was
12.64 per 1000 over 15 years, practically the same as for 1901, while
disability from "specified infirmities" (lunacy, idiocy, epilepsy,
deformity, etc.)--degeneracies strongly hereditary--rose rapidly from
5.32 in 1874 to 10.29 in 1901, or taking the total sickness and
infirmity, from 17.96 in 1874 to 23.01 in 1901.
On the last census date there were 340,230 bread-winners, and 12,747
persons suffering from sickness, accident, and infirmity, or 26 fit to
work and earn for every one unfit.
The cost to the Colony per year of--
£
1. Hospitals, year ended 31st March, 1903 138,027
2. Charitable Aid (expended by boards),
year ended 31st March, 1903 93,158
3. Lunatic Asylums, year ended 31st Dec,
1902 (gross) 85,238
Lunatic Asylums, year ended 31st Dec,
1902 (nett) 64,688
4. Industrial Schools, year ended 31st Dec,1902
Government Industrial Schools for
neglected and criminal children 21,708
Government Expenditure on Private
Denominational Industrial Schools 2,526
5. Police Force, year ended 31st March, 1903 123,804
6. Prisons, year ended 31st March, 1903 32,070
7. Criminal Courts (Criminal Prosecutions),
year ended 31st March, 1903 16,813
8. Old Age Pensions (pensions only for
persons over 65 years of age, who
have been 25 years in the Colony,
and who make a declaration of
poverty, including departmental
expenses) 212,962
A total of £705,756. This constitutes the burden due to defectives and
defects in others, a handful of workers have to bear in a sparse
population of 800,000 souls in one of the finest countries on which the
sun of heaven ever shone.
The burden which the fit have to bear has often been referred to by Dr.
MacGregor, who states in one of his reports, "Wives and husbands,
parents of bastards, all alike are encouraged by lavish charity (falsely
so called) to entirely shirk their responsibilities in the well grounded
assurance that public money will be forth-coming to keep them and their
families in quite as comfortable position as their hardworking and
independent neighbours."
The state can not decree that men shall marry, or that women shall
marry, or that women shall procreate. All it can do is to discover why
its subjects are not fertile, and remove the causes so far as it is
possible.
As people become educated they become conscious of their limitations,
and endeavour to break through them and better their conditions.
The more difficult this process is, the less likely will men and women
be to incur the burden of a large family. The more the conditions of
existence are improved, the more completely is each man's wish realized,
and the more readily will he undertake the responsibilities of a family.
If the State can and will lighten the burden of taxation and modify the
strain and stress of life, it will indirectly encourage procreation.
No direct encouragement is possible. It was tried and it failed in
Sparta, it was tried by Augustus and it failed in Rome, it must fail
everywhere, for the most willing and the most ready to respond to any
provision made to encourage increase, are the unfit, and it is the
fertility of the unfit that is the very evil that has to be attacked.
It is the fertility of the unfit that makes the burden of the fit, and a
tax on bachelors, or a bonus on families, would be responded to by the
least fit, long before it affected those whose response was anticipated,
and the problem sought to be solved would only be aggravated thereby.
No encouragement whatever can the State afford to give to the natural
increase of population till it has successfully grappled with the
propagation of defectives.
The burden of life would be lessened by nearly one-third if the
fertility of defectives could be stopped.
The State would have to support only those who acquired defects, the
scars of service more honourable than wealth, in their efforts to
support themselves and families, and these would be few indeed, if
inherited tendencies could be eliminated or reduced to a minimum.
It is the purpose of this work to attempt to describe a method that will
help to bring about this end.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER IX.
THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE UNFIT IN RELATION TO THE STATE.
_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. Mac Gregorys 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 clutch.--At the age of maturity they are left to
propogate their kind_.
THE humanitarian spirit, born 1900 years ago, effectually
checked all inhuman practices for disposal of the unfit. Christ is the
Author of this spirit. The noisy triumph of His persecutors had scarcely
died away before His conception of the sanctity of human life found
expression in the mission of those Roman maidens who in His name devoted
their lives to collecting exposed infants from the environs of their
city--that they might rear and educate them and bring them to the
Church.
Not only has it done this, but it has taught society that its first and
highest duty is to its weaker brethren, who constitute the unfit. All
our modern institutions are based on this sentiment, and what is the
result? Weaklings are born into the world and the weaker they are the
more carefully are they tended and nursed. The law of the struggle for
existence, _i.e._, the law of Justice is suspended or modified, and the
unfit are allowed to live, or at least allowed to live a little longer,
long enough indeed to propagate their kind.
Hospitals and Homes and Charitable institutions all combine their
energies, and direct their efforts to nurture those whom the laws of
nature decree should die.
Sympathy and not indignation is aroused when a defective is born, and
the result of all the effort which that sympathy evokes is that the
little weakling and thousands such are safely led and tended all the way
to the child-bearing period of life, only to repeat their history, in
others.
Not only do defects "run in families," but they run in groups, and a
physical defect such as club-foot, cleft palate, or any arrested
development, is apt to be associated with some mental defect, and it is
the mental more than the physical defects of individuals that prevent
them being self-supporting helpful members of society.
In the "North American Review" for August, 1903, Sir John Gorst declares
that:--
"The condition of disease, debility, and defective sight and hearing, in
the public elementary schools in poorer districts, is appalling. The
research of a recent Royal Commission has disclosed that of the children
in the public schools of Edinburgh, 70 per cent, are suffering from
disease of some kind, more than half from defective vision, nearly half
from defective hearing, and 30 per cent, from starvation. The physical
deterioration of the recruits who offer themselves for the army is a
subject of increasing concern. There are grounds for at least suspecting
a growing degeneracy of the population of the United Kingdom,
particularly in the great towns."
The following table gives the charges before Magistrates in our
Courts:--
Year. Proportion per thousand of
mean population.
1894 24.76
1897 26.87
1898 29.42
1899 29.48
1900 31.54
1901 33.20
1902 35.19
Now who are the unfit? Are they more fertile than the fit? and do they
propagate their kind?
The following defects constitute their victims members of that great
class of degenerates who are unfit to procreate healthy normal
offspring. Many of these conditions are partly congenital and partly
acquired, but in the majority of defectives a transmitted taint is
present.
I. Congenital defects:--
1. Idiocy.
2. Imbecility.
3. Criminal Taint.
4. Insanity.
5. Inebriate Taint.
6. Pauperism.
7. Deaf Mutism.
8. Epilepsy.
II. Acquired defects:--
1. Crime.
2. Insanity.
3. Epilepsy.
4. Inebrity.
5. Confirmed Pauperism.
With the exception of the very young and the very old, all members of
society, who have to be supported by others, constitute the unfit. Many
are supported by friends and relatives, but year by year, it is becoming
more noticeable, that the moral guardians of the unfit are shirking
their responsibility and handing their defective relatives over to the
State and demanding their gratuitous support as a right.
Dr. MacGregor, Inspector of Asylums and Hospitals, N.Z., in his report
for 1898, p. 5, says:--
"As if the State had a vested interest in the degradation of its people,
I find that they, as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, are
responding to our efforts to sap their self-respect by doing their
utmost to throw the cost of maintaining their relatives on the
ratepayers. I constantly hear the plea urged that as taxpayers and old
colonists they have a right to send their relatives to State
institutions."
Our social conditions manufacture defectives, and foster their
fertility. The strain and stress of modern competition excite an anxiety
and nervous tension under which many break down, and much of the
insanity that exists to-day is attributable to nervous strain in the
struggle of life.
The strong attractive force of one social stratum upon the next below,
excites in the latter a nervous tension which predisposes to a breakdown
in the face of some adversity.
The passion for ease and luxury, and the dread of poverty tend to
overstrain the nervous system, and numberless neurotic defectives fall
back upon society, and give themselves up to the propagation of their
kind.
Our charitable aid institutions tend largely to swell the numbers of the
great unfit.
Dr. MacGregor in one of his valuable and forcible reports upon our
charitable aid institutions, says:--
"Our lavish and indiscriminate outdoor relief, whose evils I am tired of
recapitulating,--our shameless abuse of the hospital system,--the
crowding of our asylums by people in their dotage, kept there because
there is no suitable place to send them to, and many of them sent by
friends anxious only to be relieved of the duty of supporting and caring
for them,--what is it all coming to?"...
"The practical outcome of our overlooking the continued accumulation of
degenerates among our people by our fostering of all kinds of weakness
will necessarily be, if it continues, that society will itself
degenerate. Taxation will increase by leaps and bounds, and the
industrious and self-respecting citizens will rebel, especially if
taxation is expected to meet all the demands of a legislature that puts
our humanitarian idea of justice in the place of charity."
It has already been urged that there is no evidence of any physiological
defect in any class of society interfering with fertility. Sexual
inhibition, from prudential motives is the real cause in New Zealand.
Sexual inhibition implies well-developed self-control, the very force in
which almost all defectives are most deficient, and the absence of which
makes them criminals, drunkards and paupers. In almost all defectives
too, prudence is conspicuous by its absence.
The only moral force we know of, that has curtailed, or will curtail,
the family within the limits of comfortable subsistence, is sexual
inhibition with prudence. But this force is absolutely impossible
amongst defectives.
It is not only a powerful force among the normal, but with us to-day it
is powerfully operative. Amongst the defectives it does not and cannot
exist.
Apart from observation and statistics, therefore, it can be shown that
the birth-rate amongst the unfit is undisturbed. They marry and are
given in marriage, free from all restraint save that of environment, and
worst of all they propagate their kind.
Dr. Clouston says (Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 4th Ed., p.
330) "As we watch children grow up we see that some have the sense of
right and wrong, the conscience, developed much sooner and much stronger
than others; just as some have their eye teeth much sooner than others;
and looking at adults, we see that some never have much of this sense
developed at all. This is notoriously the case in some of those whose
ancestors for several generations have been criminals, insane or
drunkards." Again (p. 331) "We know that some of the children of many
generations of thieves take to stealing, as a young wild duck among tame
ones takes to hiding in holes, and that the children of savage races
cannot copy at once our ethics nor our power of controlling our actions.
It seems to take many generations to redevelop an atrophied conscience.
There is no doubt that an organic lawlessness is transmitted
hereditarily."
Mr. W. Bevan Lewis says (A text-book of Mental Disease, p. 203) "It is
also notable, that in a large proportion of cases, we find the history
of ancestral insanity attached to the grand-parents, or the collateral
line of uncles and aunts, significant of a more remote origin for the
neurosis. The actual proportion of cases revealing strongly-marked
hereditary features (often involving several members of the subject's
ancestry), amounts to 36 per cent;" while Mr. Briscoe declares (Journal
of Mental Science, Oct. 1896) that 90% of the insane have a heredity of
insanity.
The following table from Dr. MacGregor's reports gives an account of two
families in New Zealand and their Asylum history.
Cost per head.
Number. Name. Rate £1 Total
Per week. Cost.
Family of B (Brothers). £ s. d. £ s. d.
I. A.B. 80 0 0
II. C.B. 274 4 0
III. D.B. 230 2 0
IV. E.B. 8 2 0
V. F.B. 8 2 0
--------- 600 12 0
Family of C.
I. A.C. (wife) 472 2 0
II. B.C. (husband of A.C.) 418 0 0
III. D.C. (daughter of A.C.) 834 2 0
IV. E.C. (ditto) 1,318 2 0
V. F.C. (illegitimate
daughter of E.C.) 169 8 0
VI. G.C. (husband of F.C.
but no blood relation) 5 2 0
------------ 3,216 16 0
------------
£3,817 8 0
In his report for 1897, the same writer says:--"I know of a 'defective'
half-imbecile girl, who has had already five illegitimate children by
different fathers, all of whom are now being supported by the Charitable
Aid Board, while, of course, the mother is maintained, and encouraged to
propagate more;" while in an appendix to a pamphlet on "Some Aspects of
the Charitable Aid question," he gives the following history of two
defective cases:--
J.A. admitted to Lunatic Asylum, May, 1897.
Three medical men report on her as follows:--"She appears imbecile, but
without delusions: natural imbecility, stupid, idiotic expression; baby
one month old; age between 30 and 40. Suffering from dementia;
lactational."
J.A., husband aged 69; labourer, average earnings 15s. week. He wishes
to get admission into some Old Man's Home.
This couple have six children--four girls and one boy. A. aged 12; B.
10; C. 9; D. (boy) 5; and E. 3 years. These children are all in the
Industrial School. There is also one baby, born April, 1897; has been
put out to nurse by the County Council.
The sister of Mrs. J.A. in Salvation Army Home. There are two brothers,
whereabouts not known. The police report on this case that the whole of
the relatives of Mrs. J.A. were partly imbecile, always in a helpless
condition and state of destitution, and have been for years supported
partly by charity of neighbours and help from the Charitable Aid Boards.
J.J., the father, now dead, reported as a "lazy, drunken fellow."
A.J., the mother, "a drunken prostitute" (police report 1886). "Makes a
precarious living at nursing" (police report 1897); in destitute
circumstances, living with a man known as a thief.
This couple had seven children--six boys and one girl:--
A., committed to Industrial School, 1877; discharged from there 1890;
aged 18. Sentenced in 1896 to three years for burglary.
B., committed to Industrial school for larceny in 1883; discharged from
there, 1887; aged 17.
C., committed to Industrial School for breaking into and stealing, 1886;
aged 16; discharged, 1890.
D., aged 14; E. 9½; and F., 7 years; were sent to Industrial School
in 1891 by the Charitable Aid Board, the father being dead and the
mother in gaol.
D. was discharged last year, aged 18. F. is in hospital for removal of
nasal growth, and defective eyesight. E. was admitted to a lunatic
Asylum, September, 1897. Four medical men report on him as follows:--"A
case of satyriasis from congenital defect." "His depraved habits result
of bad bringing up by his mother." "Probably hereditary." "A case of
moral depravity associated with mental deficiency, and cretinism." The
youngest of the family, a girl aged 11, is said to be dependent on her
mother.
With regard to the hereditary nature of Insanity, John Charles Bucknill
and Daniel Hack Tuke, M.D.'s, in "A Manual of Psychological Medicine,"
4th Ed., p. 65, says:--
"Certainly, if in ever so small degree there is to be a stamping out of
insanity, we must act on the principle, better let the individual suffer
than run the risk of bequeathing a legacy of insanity to the next
generation.... With regard to males, marriage would no doubt be highly
beneficial in many instances, _and if the risk of progeny is not run,
may well be encouraged_."
Esquirol, quoted by Bucknill and Tuke, p. 58, says:--"Of all diseases
Insanity is the most hereditary."
Bucknill and Tuke, p. 647, say:--
"Of marriage it may be said that the celibacy of the insane is the
prophylaxis of Insanity in the race, and although a well chosen mate and
a happy marriage may sometimes postpone or even prevent the development
of insanity in the individual, still no medical man, having regard to
the health of the community, or even of that of the family, can possibly
feel himself justified in recommending the marriage of any person of
either sex in whom the insane diathesis is well marked."
Again (pp. 647 and 648) "It is thus that the seeds of mental diseases
and of moral evils are sown broadcast through the land; and other new
defects and diseases are multiplied and varied with imbecilities, and
idiocies, and suicidal and other propensities and dispositions, leading
to all manner of vice and crime. The marriage of hereditary lunatics is
a veritable Pandora's box of physical and moral evil."
The least fit, then, are the most fertile, and the most fertile are
subject to the common law of heredity, and the defects are transmitted
to their offspring, often accentuated by the intermarriage which their
circumstances favour or even necessitate.
But this is not all. The least fit have the worst environment, and in
the worst possible surroundings the progeny of the unfit multiply and
develop. They are born into conditions, well described by Dr. Alice
Vicery, in a paper on "The food supplies of the next generation."
"Conditions in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary
for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal
state, cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced
to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary
conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which
the pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in
which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of
starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation in which
the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of
unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."
What possible hope can there be for the progeny of defectives born with
vicious, criminal, drunken or pauper tendencies, into an environment
whose whole influence from infancy to maturity tends to accentuate and
develop these inherited defects?
In this pitiable stratum of human society, vice and misery, as checks to
increase, reign supreme, but as no other check exists, fertility is at
its maximum, and keeps close up on the heels of the positive checks.
The State in her humanitarian sympathy, and in New Zealand it is
extravagant, puts forth every effort to improve the conditions of its
"submerged tenth." Insanitary conditions are improved, the rooms by law
enlarged, the air is sweetened, the water is purified, the homes are
drained. The delicate and diseased are taken to our hospitals, the deaf
and blind to our deaf-mute institutions, the deformed and the fatherless
to our orphan homes. And all are carefully nursed as tender precious
plants. They are snatched from Nature's clutch and reared as prize stock
are reared and kept in clover, till they can propagate their kind.
We feed and clothe the unfit, however unfit, and then encourage their
procreation, and as soon as they are matured we foster their fertility.
No want of human sympathy for the poor unfortunates of our race is in
these words expressed,--a statement simply of the inevitable
consequences of unscientific and anti-social methods of dealing with the
degenerate.
No State can afford to shut its eyes to the magnitude of this problem.
The procreation of the unfit must be faced and grappled with. And the
greater the decline in the birth-rate of our best stock, the more urgent
does the solution of the problem become. For is not the proportion of
the unfit to the fit yearly increasing!
It has become the most pressing duty of the State, in face of the great
change that has so rapidly come over our natural increase, to declare
that the procreation of the unfit shall cease, or at least, that it
shall be considerably curtailed and placed among the vanishing evils,
with a view to its final extinction.
CHAPTER X.
WHAT ANÆSTHETICS AND ANTISEPTICS HAVE MADE POSSIBLE.
_Education of defectives in prudence and self-restraint of little
avail.--Surgical suggestions discussed._
For the intelligent mind, which I assume has already been impressed with
the importance of such an inquiry, I think I have set forth the salient
truths with sufficient clearness, but holding that a recitation of
social faults, without a suggestion as to social reforms, is not only
useless but mischievous, I shall endeavour to show not only that the
situation is not hopeless, but that science and experience have, or will
reveal means to the accomplishment of all rationally desired ends, and
that it remains only for intelligence to enquire that sentiment may move
up to the line so as to harmonise with science, with justice, and with
the demands of a growing necessity.
These questions of population are not new. More than two thousand years
ago, many of the wisest philosophers of all the centuries meditated
deeply upon the tendencies of the population to crowd upon subsistence,
and in many ages and many countries, the situation has been discussed
with serious forebodings for the future.
In all ages thinking men have regarded war with aversion, yet with peace
and domestic prosperity other dangers arose to threaten the progress of
the race, and as the passing generations cried out for some remedy for
the ever pressing evils, thinking men have been proposing measures
somewhat harmonising with the knowledge or the sentiment of the times.
Whether we are wiser than our ancestors remains an unsettled question.
The old Greeks faced the problem boldly. There were two dangers in the
minds of these ancient philosophers. There was the danger of
over-population of good citizens, and there was the danger of increasing
the burden good citizens had to bear by the maintenance of defectives.
However good the breed, over-population was an economic danger, for,
said Aristotle, "The legislator who fixes the amount of property should
also fix the number of children, for if the children are too many for
the property the law must be broken." (Politics II, 7-5.) And he further
declares (ib. VII. 16 25) "As to the exposure and rearing of children,
let there be a law that no deformed child shall live"; and the exposure
of infants was for years the Grecian method of eliminating the unfit.
A century ago "Parson Malthus" dealt with over-population without regard
to the fitness of individuals to survive, and he advised the exercise
of moral restraint expressed in delayed marriage, to prevent population
pressing on the limits of food, which he maintained it invariably tends
to do. After the high souled Malthus, came the Neo-Malthusians, who,
although they retained the name perverted the teaching of this great
demographist, and some Socialist writers of high repute still advocate
the systematic instruction of the poor in Neo-Malthusian practices.
The rising tide of firm conviction in the minds of present day
sociologists, that the fertility of the unfit is menacing the stability
of the whole social superstructure, is forcing many to advocate more
drastic measures for the salvation of the race. Weinhold seriously
proposed the annual mutilation of a certain portion of the children of
the popular classes. Mr. Henry M. Boies, the most enlightened analyst of
the problem of the unfit, in his exhaustive work "Prisoners and
Paupers," urges the necessity of effectively controlling the fecundity
of the degenerate classes, and he points to surgery, and life-long
incarceration as the solution of the problem. Dr. McKim, in an
exhaustive work on "Heredity and Human Progress," after declaring that
he is profoundly convinced of the inefficiency of the measures which we
bring to bear against the weakness and depravity of our race, ventures
to plead for the remedy which alone, as he believes, can hold back the
advancing tide of disintegration. He states his remedy thus:--"The roll
then, of those whom our plan would eliminate, consists of the following
classes of individuals coming under the absolute control of the
State:--idiots, imbeciles, epileptics, habitual drunkards and insane
criminals, the larger number of murderers, nocturnal house-breakers,
such criminals whatever their offence as might through their
constitutional organization appear very dangerous, and finally,
criminals who might be adjudged incorrigible. Each individual of these
classes would undergo thorough examination, and only by due process of
law would his life be taken from him. The painless extinction of these
lives would present no practical difficulty--in carbonic acid gas we
have an agent which would instantaneously fulfil the need."
These briefly are some of the remedies which have been advocated and in
part applied for the protection of the race from degeneracy. I quote
them, not with approval, but merely to show how grave and serious the
social outlook is, in the minds of some of the best thinkers and truest
philanthropists that have taught mankind. If the fertility of the fit
could be kept uniformly at its normal rate in a state of nature, the
race would have little to fear, for the tendency to further degeneration
and consequent extinction amongst the defective would be sufficient to
counteract their disposition to a high fertility. But in all civilized
nations, the fertility of the fit is rapidly departing from that normal
rate, and Mr. Herbert Spencer declares, with the gloomiest pessimism,
that the infertility of the best citizens is the physiological result of
their intellectual development. I have already expressed the opinion
that prudence and social selfishness, operating through sexual
self-restraint on the part of the best citizens of the State, are the
cause of their infertility. It is impossible for the State to correct
this evil, except by lessening the burden the fit man has to bear; and
the elimination of the unfit, by artificial selection, is the surest and
most effective way of bringing this about.
We have learned from the immortal Pasteur the true and scientific method
of artificial selection of the fit, by the elimination of the unfit. We
have already seen that he examined the moth, to find if it were healthy,
and rejected its eggs if it were diseased. Medical knowledge of heredity
and disease makes it possible to conduct analogous examinations of
prospective mothers; and surgery secreted in the ample and luxurious
folds of anæsthesia, and protected by its guardian angels antiseptics,
makes it possible to prevent the fertilization of human ova with a
vicious taint. It is possible to sterilize defective women, and the
wives of defective men by an operation of simple ligature, which
produces absolutely no change whatever in the subjects of it, beyond
rendering this fertilization impossible, for the rest of life. This
remedy for the great and growing evil which confronts us to-day is
suggested, not to avenge but to protect society, and in profound pity
for the classes who are a burden to themselves, as well as to those who
have to tend and support them.
The problem of the unfit is not new. The burden of supporting those
unable to support themselves has been keenly felt in all ages and among
all peoples.
The ancients realized the danger and the burden, but found no difficulty
when the stress became acute in enacting that all infants should be
examined and the defective despatched.
To come nearer home, Boeltius tells us, that, "in old times when a Scot
was affected with any hereditary disease their sons were emasculated,
their daughters banished, and if any female affected with such disease
were pregnant, she was to be burned alive."
Aristotle declared (Politics Book II, p. 40) that "neglect of this
subject is a never failing cause of poverty, and poverty is the parent
of revolution and crime," and he advocated habitual abortion as one
remedy against over-population. The combined wisdom of the Greeks found
no better method of keeping population well within the limits of the
State's power to support its members than abortion, and the exposure of
infants.
Since Aristotle's time abortion has been largely practised by civilized
nations. Mutilation and infibulation of females have been practised by
savages with the same end in view, while vasectomy, orchotomy, and
ovariotomy, have had their avowed advocates in our own time.
The purpose of all these measures was to limit population with little or
no distinction as to fitness to survive. The Spartans in ancient times,
and many social reformers of to-day have discussed and advocated the
artificial limitation of the unfit. The exposure of defective infants
was the Spartan method of preserving the physical and mental stature of
the race.
The surgical operations on both sexes advocated by some social writers
of recent date, have not been received with much favour, and, as a
social reform have not been practised. As operations they are grave and
serious, profound in their effect upon the individual, and a violation
of public sentiment. Anæsthetics and antiseptics have, however, made
them possible, and if a surgical operation could be devised, simple and
safe in performance, inert in every way but one, and against which there
would be no individual or public sentiment, its application as a social
reform, would go far to solve the grave and serious problem of the
fertility of the unfit.
The unfit are subject to no moral law in the matter of procreation. They
can be taught nothing, and they will practise nothing. Like the lower
animals they obey their instincts and gratify their desires as they
arise.
It has been seriously suggested that the poor should be systematically
taught Neo-Malthusian methods for the limitation of their offspring.
The best among the poor might practise them, the worst certainly would
not, and the limitation among the best would only stimulate the
fertility of the worst. This is the most innocent and harmless of the
numerous suggestions made by reformers for controlling the fecundity of
the poor.
Of surgical methods, castration of males, Oophorectomy or the removal of
the ovaries in women, and vasectomy, or the section of the cords of the
testicles, have all been suggested.
Annual castration of a certain number of the children of the popular
classes was not long ago seriously proposed by Weinhold.
Boies, in his "Prisoners and Paupers," declares that surgical
interference is the only method of dealing with the criminal, and
preventing him from reproducing his kind. He says:--"These organs have
no function in the human organism except the creation and gratification
of desire and the reproduction of the species. Their loss has no effect
upon the health, longevity, or abilities of the individual of adult
years. The removal of them therefore by destroying desire would actually
diminish the wants of nature and increase the enjoyments of life for
paupers. A want removed is equivalent to a want supplied. In other
words, such removal would be a positive benefit to the abnormal rather
than a deprivation, rather a kindness than an injury. This operation
bestowed upon the abnormal inmates of our prisons, reformatories, jails,
asylums, and public institutions, would entirely eradicate those
unspeakable evil practices which are so terribly prevalent, debasing,
destructive, and uncontrolled in them. It would confer upon the inmates
health and strength, for weakness and impotence, satisfaction and
comfort for discontent and insatiable desire."
Anæsthetics have ensured that these operations may be performed without
the slightest suspicion of pain, and with careful sympathetic surgery,
pain may be absent throughout the whole of convalescence. Antiseptics
have made it possible to perform these operations with practically no
risk to life.
Though castration and Oophorectomy can be performed with safety and
without pain, they are absolutely unjustifiable operations, if done to
produce sterility.
Every incision and every stitch in surgery, beyond the necessities of
the case, are objectionable, and to remove an organ, when the section of
its duct is sufficient is to say the least of it, bad surgery.
Vasectomy is the resection of a portion of the duct of the testicles,
followed by ligature of the ends. No doubt ligature alone would be
sufficient for the purpose, but up to the present, a piece of the duct
has been removed, when this operation has been found necessary in the
treatment of disease.
This duct is the secretory tube of the testicle, so that when it is
occluded, the secretion is dammed back, and degeneration and atrophy of
the organ are induced. It soon wastes, and becomes as functionless as
though it were removed.
This operation can be performed in a Surgery with the aid of a little
Cocaine, and the patient may walk to his home, sterilized for the rest
of his natural life, after the complete loss of any accumulated fluid.
Of these two operations for the sterilization of men, vasectomy is
preferable. The major operation for the purpose of inducing artificial
sterility should never for a moment be considered.
But vasectomy, though surgically simple, and a less violation of
sentiment than castration, cannot be justified except in exceptional
cases.
Neither of these operations makes the subjects of them altogether or at
once impotent, certainly not for years. It sterilizes and partly unsexes
them and in the end completely so.
But the physical and mental changes that follow the operation in the
young adolescent are grave and serious, and a violent outrage upon the
man's nature and sentiment.
Society can hope for nothing but evil from the man she forcibly unsexes;
but if he must be kept in durance vile for the whole of his life there
is little need for such an operation.
The criminal cases bad enough to justify this grave and extreme measure
should be incarcerated for life.
The cases, it has been thought, that fully justify this operation are
those guilty of repeated criminal assaults.
Such a claim arises out of insufficient knowledge of the physiology of
sex, and the pathology of crime. Emasculation would have little
influence in preventing a recurrence of this crime, for the operation
does not render its subjects immediately impotent, nor does it change
their sexual nature any more than it beautifies their character.
The instinct remains, and the power to gratify it remains at least for
some years. With the less knowledge of surgery of earlier times, a
social condition in which such a practice might be rationally
considered, is conceivable, but with the present state of our
profession, such measures would be unthinkable.
CHAPTER XI.
TUBO-LIGATURE.
_The fertility of the criminal a greater danger to society than his
depradations._--_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._
There is a growing feeling that society must be protected, not so much
against the criminal as against the fertility of the criminal, and no
rational, practicable, acceptable method has as yet been devised.
The operations on men to induce sterility have been discussed and
dismissed as unsatisfactory.
But analogous operations may be performed on women. And if women can be
sterilized by surgical interference, whence comes the necessity of
sterilizing both?
Oophorectomy, or removal of the ovaries is analogous to castration. It
is an equally safe, though a slightly more severe and complicated
operation.
It can be safely and painlessly performed, the mortality in
uncomplicated cases being practically nil.
The changes physical and mental are not so grave as in the analogous
operation on the opposite sex, and they vary considerably at different
ages and in different cases. The later in life the operation is
performed the less the effect produced. At or after the menopause (about
the 45th year) little or no change is noticeable.
In many, and especially in younger women however, grave mental and
physical changes are induced. The menstrual function is destroyed, the
appearance often becomes masculine, the face becomes coarse and heavy,
and hair may appear on the lips and chin. Lethargy and increase of
weight are often noticed, and not a few, especially in congenitally
neurotic cases, have an attack of insanity precipitated.
On the same principle on which the radical operation on men was
condemned, Oophorectomy must also be condemned. It is a serious
operation, often attended with grave mental and physical disturbances,
not the least of which is the partial unsexing of those subjected to it.
While these are delicate they are also pressing questions, questions
which, like the mythical riddle of the Sphynx, not to answer means to be
destroyed, yet the sentimental difficulties, are accentuated by modern
progress, for the public conscience becomes more sensitive as problems
become more grave. But as science has prepared the bridge over which
society may safely march, so, with rules easily provided by an
enlightened community all remedial measures formerly proposed--wise in
their times, probably, may now be waived aside.
With our present knowlege, the simple process of tubo-ligature renders
unsexing absolutely unnecessary in order to effect complete and
permanent sterility. As the lesser operation vasectomy, is effectual in
men, so is a lesser operation, tubo-ligature effectual in women. And it
has this paramount advantage that, whereas vasectomy being an occlusion
of a secretory duct, leads to complete atrophy and destruction of the
testis, ligature of the Fallopian tube, which is only a uterine
appendage and not a secretory duct of the ovary, has absolutely no
effect whatever on that organ.
A simple ligature of each Fallopian tube would effectually and
permanently sterilise, without in any way whatever altering or changing
the organs concerned, or the emotions, habits, disposition, or life of
the person operated on.
The Fallopian tubes are two in number, attached to the upper angles of
the uterus, and communicating therewith. Each is about five inches in
length, and trumpet-shaped at its extremity, which floats free in the
pelvic cavity.
Attached to the margin of this trumpet-shaped extremity, is a number of
tentacle-like fringes, the function of which is to embrace the portion
of the ovary, where an ovum has matured during or immediately after
menstruation.
At all other times these tubes are practically unattached to the
ovaries. Ova may and do mature on the surface of the ovaries, but do not
always pass into the Fallopian tubes; being almost microscopic, they are
disintegrated and reabsorbed. If they do pass into a tube they are lost
or fertilized as the case may be.
It can be seen that the function and vitality of the ovaries are in no
way affected by the tubes. The ovarian function goes on, whether the
tubes perform their function of conveyance or not, and if this function
can be destroyed, life-long sterility is assured. There is no abdominal
operation more simple, rapid and safe, than simple ligature of the
Fallopian tubes. It may be performed by way of the natural passage, or
by the abdominal route, the choice depending on various circumstances.
If the former route be taken, there may be nothing to indicate, in some
cases not even to a medical man, that such an operation has been
performed.
The Fallopian tubes have been ligatured by Kossman, Ruhl and Neuman for
the sterilization of women with pelvic deformities; but all testify to
the danger of subsequent abnormal or ectopic pregnancy, and several
instances are given. Mr. Bland Sutton relates a case in an article on
Conservative Hysterectomy in the British Medical Journal.
After numerous experiments on healthy tubes, I have found that simple
ligature with even a moderate amount of force in tying will cut the tube
through in almost any part of its length. The mucous lining is so thrown
into folds that its thickness in relation to the peritoneal layer is
considerable. Because of this, the tube when tied alone is brittle, and
a ligature applied to it will very easily cut through, and either allow
of reunion of the severed ends or leave a patent stump. In a recorded
case in which pregnancy occurred after each tube was ligatured in two
places, and then divided with a knife, a patent stump was no doubt left.
In order to obviate this danger the peritoneal layer must be opened, and
the mucous membrane, which is quite brittle and easily removed, must be
torn away for about one quarter of an inch. A simple cat-gut or silk
ligature lightly tied would then be sufficient to insure complete and
permanent occlusion.
Nature often performs this operation herself, with the inevitable and
irrevocable result, lifelong sterility, with no tittle of positive
evidence during life of its occurrence.
Here are a few examples:--A young married woman has a miscarriage; it is
not severe, and she is indiscreet enough to be about at her duties in a
day or two, but within a few days or so she finds she must return to
bed, with feverishness and pelvic pain. Before a month is past she is up
and quite herself again. But she never afterwards conceives. What has
happened? To the most careful and critical examination nothing abnormal
is detected. Her general health, her vitality, her emotional and sexual
life, her youthful vigorous appearance, all are unimpaired. But she is
barren, and why? A little inflammation occurred in the uterus and spread
along the tubes. The sides of the tubes cohered, permanently united by
adhesive inflammation, and complete and permanent occlusion resulted.
The operation of tubo-ligature is an artificial imitation of this
inflamatory process.
Pelvic inflammation, sometimes very slight, following a birth, or the
same process set up by uterine pessaries used for displacements, may
induce adhesive inflammation in the tubes, and simple and permanent
sterility is the incurable result. It is a well known fact that
prostitutes are usually sterile, and this arises from the prevalence of
venereal disease, which produces gonorrhoeal inflammation of the
Fallopian tubes, resulting in complete and permanent occlusion.
This process could be best imitated, if cauterisation of the tubes were
a safe and reliable procedure. An electric cautery passed along the
tubes would result in a simple and speedy occlusion. But in the present
state of our gynecological knowledge this appears impracticable.
We have therefore at our hand, a simple, safe, and certain method of
stopping procreation by the sterilization of women by tubo-ligature.
This operation would entail no hardship on women. It is so easy, safe
and painless, that thousands would readily submit to it to-morrow, to be
relieved from the anxiety which a possible increase in their already too
numerous families excites. Hundreds of women and men to-day are living
unnatural lives, because of their refusal to bring children into the
world with the hereditary taint they know courses in their own veins.
Many men are living loose and irregular lives, amongst the easy women of
society, because the indiscretion of their youth has damned them for
ever with a syphilitic taint, which they could not fail to transmit to
their progeny.
Many virtuous men and women are living a life of abstinence from even
each other's society, because their physician has taught them something
of the law of heredity. Would not all these women readily submit to
sterilization?
As it produces no mental nor moral, nor physical change, it violates no
law, and outrages no sentiment. It is an outrage upon society, and a
greater upon an innocent helpless victim to bring a defective into the
world; it is a moral act to prevent it by this means.
And of all the methods yet suggested or devised, or practised,
tubo-ligature is the simplest, most effective, and least opposed to
sentiment and prejudice.
It will of course be asked:--What about criminals and defective men? Let
their wives be sterilized. The wife of any criminal would deem it a boon
to be protected from the offspring of such a man, so would society.
If he is not married, then society must take the risk, and it is not
very great. The women who will be his companions will be either
sterilized by disease or by tubo-ligature, because they are defectives.
This protection from the progeny of defective men, though not absolute,
is complete enough for all practical purposes.
If all defective women and the wives of all defective men are
sterilized, a greater improvement will take place in the race in the
next 50 years, than has been accomplished by all the sanitation of the
Victorian era.
CHAPTER XII.
SUGGESTIONS AS TO APPLICATION.
_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._
The fertility of the unfit goes on unrestrained by any other check, save
vice and misery. The great moral checks have not, and cannot have any
place with them. But the State is, by its humanitarian zeal, limiting
the scope and diminishing the force of these natural checks amongst all
classes of the community, but especially amongst the unfit, so that its
policy now fosters the fertility of this class, while it fails to arrest
the declining nativity of our best citizens. The greater the fertility
of the unfit, the greater the burden the fit have to bear, and the less
their fertility.
The State's present policy therefore, fosters the fertility of the
unfit, and discourages the fertility of the fit. This disastrous policy
must be changed without delay. The State can arrest the gradual
degradation of its people, by sterilizing all defective women and the
wives of defective men falling into the hands of the law. Mr. Henry M.
Boies in "Prisoners and Paupers" suggests life-long isolation. He
says:--"It is time however that society should interpose in this
propagation of criminals. It is irrational and absurd to occupy our
attention and exhaust our liberality with the care of his constantly
growing class, without any attempt to restrict its reproduction. This is
possible too, without violating any humanitarian instinct, by
imprisonment for life; and this seems to be the most practicable
solution of the problem in America. As soon as an individual can be
identified as an hereditary or chronic criminal, society shall confine
him or her in a penitentiary at self-supporting labour for life.
Every State should have an institution, adapted to the safe and secure
separation of such from society, where they can be employed at
productive labour, without expense to the public, during their natural
life. When this is ended with them, the class will become extinct, and
not before. Then each generation would only have to take care of its own
moral cripples and defectives, without the burden of the constantly
increasing inheritance of the past. When upon a third conviction the
judicial authorities determine the prisoner to belong to the criminal
class, the law should imperatively require the sentence to be the
penitentiary for life, whatever the particular crime committed."
M. Boies defines a criminal as one in whom two successive punishments,
according to law, have failed to prevent a third offence.
If such a criminal is a woman, she should be offered the alternative of
surgical sterility or incarceration during the child bearing period of
her life; if a man, his wife should be offered this remedy against the
procreation of criminals in exchange for her husband, on the expiry of
his sentence, or the protection of divorce.
No woman in the child-bearing period of life should be released from an
Asylum, until this operation has been performed. If a man is committed,
his wife should have the option of divorce or be sterilized before his
release.
A central Board should issue marriage certificates, after consideration
of confidential medical reports upon the health, physical condition, and
family history of the parties to a proposed marriage contract.
Medical officers should be appointed in the various centres of
population by the central Board, and fees on reports should be paid
after the manner of Life Insurance fees.
In fact the Life Insurance system would serve as a good model, for the
establishment of a system of marriage control, and if questions
involving a more detailed family history were added to a typical Life
Insurance report form, it could hardly be improved upon, for the
purpose of marriage health reports.
If upon consideration of the medical report of the contracting parties,
in accordance with the law upon the subject, a certificate of marriage
were refused, a certificate of sterilization by tubo-ligature, forwarded
to the Board by a Surgeon, should entitle to the marriage certificate.
No law should attempt to step in between two lovers, who have become
attached to each other by the bonds of a strong affection, lest a
greater evil befall both themselves and society.
A marriage certificate of health should state the complete family
history as well as the physical condition of the parties to a proposed
marriage, and such certificates should be issued only by the Central
Board of Experts, who would receive the medical reports of its own
medical officers.
When the principle of artificial sterilization is accepted by the State,
the organization necessary to ensure that only the fit shall procreate,
will only be a matter of arrangement by experts.
One danger looms ahead however if the operative means of producing
artificial sterility are popularised.
Every surgeon of experience knows how readily large numbers of married
women encourage surgical treatment for ovarian and even uterine
complaints, if they become aware that such treatment is followed by
sterility. It is not at all an uncommon thing for women in all ranks of
life, to encourage, and even seek removal of the ovaries in order to
escape an increase in the family.
They become acquainted with persons who have submitted to this operation
for ovarian disease, and noting nothing but improvement in their health,
attended by sterility, their intense anxiety to enjoy immunity from
child-bearing makes them eager to submit to operation.
It would be distinctly immoral to sterilize healthy women, who become
possessed with the old Roman passion for a childless life, or who simply
wish to limit their families for any selfish or personal reason.
Any law which recognizes the induction of artificial sterility should
make operative interference with those fit to procreate a healthy stock
an offence.
Induced sterility should rank with induced abortion, and be a criminal
offence, except in certain cases which could be defined.
There is much evidence to suggest that artificial sterilization may
become as a great vice, as great a danger to the State as criminal
abortion.
Artificial abortion, as commonly performed, is a much more dangerous
operation than tubo-ligature. Of the two operations, any experienced
surgeon would readily declare that the latter is the simpler and the
safer; the one less likely to lead to unfavourable complications, and
the one, moreover, that would leave the subject of it with the better
"expectancy of life."
Anæsthetics and antiseptics have made this comparison possible and
true.
Any surgeon who performs tubo-ligature should be liable to prosecution,
unless he can justify his action according to the law relating to the
artificial sterility of the unfit.
While the law would eventually require to be obligatory, with regard to
the absolutely unfit, it would require to be permissive in all other
cases.
Many voluntarily abstain from marriage, because of a strong hereditary
tendency to certain diseases such as cancer and tubercle.
There must of necessity be many on the border-land between the fit and
the unfit, and clauses permitting sterilization under some circumstances
would be required.
CONCLUSION.
In conclusion let us briefly review the whole position taken up in this
imperfect study of a great question.
1. The birth-rate is rapidly and persistently declining.
2. The food-rate is persistently increasing.
3. The declining fertility is not uniform through all classes.
4. The fertility of the best is rapidly declining.
5. The fertility of the worst is undisturbed.
6. The policy of the State is inimical to the fertility of its
best, and fosters the fertility of its worst citizens.
7. The infertility of the best stock is due to voluntary
curtailment of the family, through sexual self-restraint.
8. No such-factor does or can obtain as a check to the fertility of
the unfit.
9. The proportion of the unfit to the fit is in consequence
annually increasing.
10. The _future_ of society demands that compulsory sterilization
of the unfit should be adopted.
11. No method ever tried or suggested offers the advantages of
simplicity, safety, effectiveness, and popularity, promised by
tubo-ligature.
12. The State must protect itself against the collateral danger of
artificial sterilization of its best stock.
The highest interest of Society and of the individual urgently requires
that the size of families be controlled.
The moral restraint of Malthus (delayed marriage) and post-nuptial
intermittent restraint are the only safe and rational methods, that our
civilization can possibly encourage, or physiology endorse.
These methods must of necessity be peculiar to the best class of people.
For the worst class of people, induced sterility, or prohibited
fertility, is an absolute necessity, if Society and civilization must
endure.
Now what are likely to be the results of, first, the moral methods, and,
second, the surgical method of our curtailment.
"It does not appear to me," says Dr. Billings (Forum, June, 1893), "that
this lessening of the birth-rate is in itself an evil, or that it will
be worth while to attempt to increase the birth-rate merely for the sake
of maintaining a constant increase in the population, because to neither
this nor the next generation will such increase be specially
beneficial."
To Aristotle, the great advantage of an abundant population was, that
the State was secured against invasion by numerous defenders.
If we can find no stronger justification for a teeming population than
this to-day, we will be forced to agree with Dr. Billings, that neither
to this nor the next generation, is a great increase especially
beneficial.
But the moral effect of judicial limitation is very great. If men and
women can marry young, one great incentive to vice is removed. If
married people can bear their children when they can best support them,
they will marry when their bodies are matured, and bear their families
when their finances are matured.
For children well provided for, and educated, and born after full
physical and mental maturity in their parents, turn out the best men and
women.
If the conditions of life are made easy, if ease and comfort are
tolerably secured to all, if the strain and stress of life are reduced,
if hardship, poverty, and want are reduced to a minimum, the sexual
instinct and parental love in human nature, so far unimpaired by any
known force, are powerful enough to keep the race alive, and insure a
progressive development.
The greater the proportion and the fertility of the defective, the less
hope for the future. If the fertility of the unfit be reduced to a
minimum, not only will many dreadful hereditary diseases be eradicated,
but the fertility of the fit will receive a powerful stimulus, because
of the great diminution there will necessarily be in the burdens they
will have to bear.
The advantages of sterility to the unfit themselves will, on the whole,
be incalculable. They are self-evident, and need not be dwelt on here.
The whole sum of human happiness would in this way be most assuredly
increased, and the aim and object of all social reform be to some extent
at least, realized.
* * * * *
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