The Fertility of the Unfit

by W. A. Chapple

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 He advised moral restraint as a preventive measure in the hope that vice and misery, as checks would be superseded, and that no more would be born into the world than there was ample food to supply.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.