Researches in European history show that the ennobled families of France, Germany, and England have rarely survived the fifth generation, and not more than six per cent. are in existence after three hundred years. Of 427 English noble families, but 41 were represented at the beginning of the 17th century. The patrician families who controlled the free cities of the Middle Ages are now known in history only. Scarcely a score have outlived the degenerative agencies of wealth, idleness, and indulgence.
The other extreme of the social scale is equally unfriendly to productiveness. It is popularly thought that the poor man has children if he has nothing else. But he must not be too poor. Surgeons of the Indian civil service have proved by ample statistics that the famines which periodically ravage the East bring in their train widespread and lasting infertility. Arrest of puberty and organic deterioration of the reproductive system are common results of the prolonged starvation, and prevent child-bearing.
The psychic contrast between this result and that of malignant epidemics is marked and singular. During and after famines the feelings dependent on sex are almost extinguished; while in epidemics of acute diseases, such as plague, cholera, and yellow fever, they are notably exalted, as they are also in leprosy.
There is also a class of maladies known in medicine as “dystrophic” on account of their tendency to diminish virility, and thus both lessen the birth rate and lead to morbid psychic states. Prominent among these are malarial fevers, tuberculosis, and the later stages of alcoholism and the opium habit. By many writers the inordinate use of tobacco is believed to exert a similar effect.
In modern life, notably in France and the eastern United States, there is a very observable infecundity in certain classes, and they the wealthiest and best educated, due unquestionably to intention on the part of the married—to purely psychic causes, therefore. In the “best society” of those localities two or three children to a marriage are as many as are wanted and as many as arrive.
That this limitation is deliberate, and not the result of reproductive debility, has been shown by an application of the law of sex at birth as formulated by Dumont. This is, that when the proportion of the sexes at birth are as 105 males to 100 females, the diminished natality is voluntary; and when it is involuntary, due to disease or malformations, this ratio is always disturbed.
As statistics prove that in modern life two-thirds of the children born alive never perpetuate their kind, through death, the single life, sterility, or other reason, it is plain that intentional limitation of offspring to a number less than four means certain extinction of the family.
3. Toxic Agents.—The toxic agents of ethnic degeneration belong to two classes, stimulant-narcotics and disease-germs. The former are voluntarily consumed by the individual, the latter he absorbs through exposure to insalubrious conditions. Both belong to preventable causes of deterioration.
Of the stimulant-narcotics, alcohol, opium, and tobacco are the most familiar. But they by no means exhaust the list. Everywhere and at all times man has had an intense craving for these nervines. Where the Koran forbids alcoholic drinks, the Arabs take refuge in kief and other species of hemp. The native Mexicans cull the peyotl, the Siberians a toadstool, the Peruvians coca.
The precise degree to which these agents have altered the intellectual and moral powers of communities has long been the theme of controversies.