CHAPTER XII
INCREASING THE MARRIAGE RATE OF THE SUPERIOR
No race can long survive unless it conforms to the principles of eugenics, and indisputably the chief requirement for race survival is that the superior part of the race should equal or surpass the inferior part in fecundity.
It follows that the superior members of the community must marry, and at a reasonably early age. If in the best elements of the community celibacy increases, or if marriage is postponed far into the reproductive period, the racial contribution of the superior will necessarily fall, and after a few generations the race will consist mainly of the descendants of inferior people, its eugenic average being thereby much lowered.
In a survey of vital statistics, to ascertain whether marriages are as frequent and as early as national welfare requires, the eugenist finds at first no particularly alarming figures.
In France, to whose vital statistics one naturally turns whenever race suicide is suggested (and usually with a holier-than-thou attitude which the Frenchman might much more correctly assume toward America), it appears that there has been a very slight decrease in the proportion of persons under 20 who are married, but that between the ages of 20 and 30 the proportion of those married has risen during recent years. The same condition exists all over Europe, according to F. H. Hankins,[105] except in England and Scotland. "Moreover on the whole marriages take place earlier in France than in England, Germany or America. Nor is this all, for a larger proportion of the French population is married than in any of these countries. Thus the birth-rate in France has continued to fall in spite of those very conditions which should have sustained it or even caused it to increase."
In America, conditions are not dissimilar. Although it is generally believed that young persons are marrying at a later age than they did formerly, the census figures show that for the population as a whole the reverse is the case. Marriages are not only more numerous, but are contracted at earlier ages than they were a quarter of a century ago. Comparison of census returns for 1890, 1900 and 1910, reveals that for both sexes the percentage of married has steadily increased and the percentage listed as single has as steadily decreased. The census classifies young men, for this purpose, in three age-groups: 15-19, 20-24, and 25-34; and in every one of these groups, a larger proportion was married in 1910 than in 1900 or 1890. Conditions are the same for women. So far as the United States as a whole is concerned, therefore, marriage is neither being avoided altogether, nor postponed unduly,—in fact, conditions in both respects seem to be improving every year.
So far the findings should gratify every eugenist. But the census returns permit further analysis of the figures. They classify the population under four headings: Native White of Native Parentage, Native White of Foreign Parentage or of Mixed Parentage, Foreign-born White, and Negro. Except among Foreign-born Whites, who are standing still, the returns for 1910 show that in every one of these groups the marriage rate has steadily increased during the past three decades; and that the age of marriage is steadily declining in all groups during the same period, with a slight irregularity of no real importance in the statistics for foreign-born males.
On the whole, then, the marriage statistics of the United States are reassuring. Even if examination is limited to the Native Whites of Native Parentage, who are probably of greater eugenic worth, as a group, than any of the other three, the marriage rate is found to be moving in the right direction.