In the words of the Commissioners, children who are brought up in such conditions, surrounded by disease and immorality and drunkenness are almost doomed to pauperism. If relief be given it should be used to check the creation of another generation of paupers. Much that is very instructive is contained in the report on the subject of children who come by one means or another to be under the control of the Guardians of the Poor, and important suggestions are made for reforms in the manner and training of such children. This, however, we need not discuss, as the spread of eugenic principles would tend to reduce their number until the time should come when the children dependent on public care should be few and exceptional. In their discussion of the causes of pauperism, the Commissioners quote a statement from a relief officer of Leeds, that one of the most important causes is early marriage of persons dependent upon casual labor. Large families are the rule. Unless we can cut off some of the sources from which that stream is being fed, the attempt to do more constructive work, whether by public assistance or by voluntary charity will continue to be swamped by hopeless cases—men and women ruined by bad habits or disease from infancy who propagate their own misery and hand on another generation of hopeless cases to the future. A great evil justifies strong measures to remedy it. This is true eugenic doctrine. P. 47–50.
THE METHODS OF RACE REGENERATION. C. W. Saleeby, M.D., CH.B., F.Z.S., F.R.S., Edinburgh; Fellow of the Obstetrical Society of Edinburgh; Member of Council of the Eugenic Education Society, of the Psychological Society, and of the National League for Physical Education and Improvement; Member of the Royal Institution and of the Society for the Study of Inebriety, etc., etc. New Tracts for the Times. Cassell & Co., Ltd., London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne. 1911.
At the National Conference on the Prevention of Destitution, held in London at Whitsuntide, 1911, we gathered together in the section dealing with this subject a number of papers by authoritative writers, whose knowledge of the problem is first-hand, and the following is an extract from the paper, the Eugenic Summary and Demand, in which I endeavored to express the substance of the evidence. The mentally defective and diseased, existing in it and as part of it, injure the community in the following ways:
1—They contribute largely to the ranks of chronic alcoholism and inebriety, with all their consequences.
2—They contribute largely to the illegitimate birth rate, that is to say, to the production of children for whose nurture, quite apart from the question of their natural defect, adequate and satisfactory provision is not, or indeed cannot be made.
3—They contribute largely to the ranks of prostitution.
4—They thus contribute largely to the propagation of the venereal diseases, with all their consequences to the present and the future.
5—They are responsible for much crime, major and minor.
6—Both directly, as chronically inefficient, and indirectly, in the ways here cited, they contribute to the number of the destitute, constituting the majority of the naturally, as distinguished from the nurturally unemployable.
7—They contribute largely as parents, married or unmarried, to parental neglect and cruelty to children which is probably more injurious to the adult life of the next generation, than most, or any of us realize.