Karl Pearson has found reason to believe that this result can be statistically traced in the birth-rate of English working people,—that a considerable decline in their fecundity, due to voluntary restriction, began after the passage of each of the laws which restricted child labor and made children an expense from which no return could be expected.
If the abolition of child labor leads to the production of fewer children in a certain section of the population the value of the result to society, in this phase, will depend on whether or not society wants that strain proportionately increased. If it is an inferior stock, this one effect of the abolition of child labor would be eugenic.
Comparing the families whose children work with those whose children do not, one is likely to conclude that the former are on the average inferior to the latter. If so, child labor is in this one particular aspect dysgenic, and its abolition, leading to a lower birth-rate in this class of the population, will be an advantage.
2. On the filial generation. The obvious result of the abolition of child labor will be, as is often and graphically told, to give children a better chance of development. If they are of superior stock, and will be better parents for not having worked as children (a proviso which requires substantiation) the abolition of their labor will be of direct eugenic benefit. Otherwise, its results will be at most indirect; or, possibly, dysgenic, if they are of undesirable stock, and are enabled to survive in greater numbers and reproduce. In necessarily passing over the social and economic aspects of the question, we do not wish it thought that we advocate child labor for the purpose of killing off an undesirable stock prematurely. We are only concerned in pointing out that the effects of child labor are many and various.
The effect of its abolition within a single family further depends on whether the children who go to work are superior to those who stay at home. If the strongest and most intelligent children are sent to work and crippled or killed prematurely, while the weaklings and feeble-minded are kept at home, brought up on the earnings of the strong, and enabled to reach maturity and reproduce, then this aspect of child labor is distinctly dysgenic.
The desirability of prohibiting child labor is generally conceded on euthenic grounds, and we conclude that its results will on the whole be eugenic as well, but that they are more complex than is usually recognized.
COMPULSORY EDUCATION
Whether one favors or rejects compulsory education will probably be determined by other arguments than those derived from eugenics; nevertheless there are eugenic aspects of the problem which deserve to be recognized.
One of the effects of compulsory education is similar to that which follows the abolition of child labor—namely, that the child is made a source of expense, not of revenue, to the parent. Not only is the child unable to work, while at school, but to send him to school involves in practice dressing him better than would be necessary if he stayed at home. While it might fit the child to work more gainfully in later years, yet the years of gain are so long postponed that the parent can expect to share in but little of it.
These arguments would not affect the well-to-do parent, or the high-minded parent who was willing or able to make some sacrifice in order that his children might get as good a start as possible. But they may well affect the opposite type of parent, with low efficiency and low ideals.[179] This type of parent, finding that the system of compulsory education made children a liability, not an immediate asset, would thereby be led to reduce the size of his family, just as he seems to have done when child labor was prohibited in England and children ceased to be a source of revenue. Compulsory education has here, then, a eugenic effect, in discouraging the reproduction of parents with the least efficiency and altruism.