[PREFACE]
[INTRODUCTION]
Chapter I.—The Problem Stated [1]
The spread of moral restraint as a check.—Predicted by Malthus.—The declining Birth-rate.—Its Universality.—Most conspicuous in New Zealand. Great increase in production of food.—With rising food rate falling birth-rate.—Malthus's checks.—His use of the term "moral restraint."—The growing desire to evade family obligations.—Spread of physiological knowledge.—All limitation involves self-restraint.—Motives for limitation.—Those who do and those who do not limit.—Poverty and the Birth-rate.—Defectives prolific and propagate their kind.—Moral restraint held to include all sexual interference designed to limit families.—Power of self-control an attribute of the best citizens.—Its absence an attribute of the worst.—Humanitarianism increases the number and protects the lives of defectives.—The ratio of the unfit to the fit.—Its dangers to the State.—Antiquity of the problem.—The teaching of the ancients.—Surgical methods already advocated.
Chapter II.—The Population Question [10]
The teaching of Aristotle and Plato.—The teaching of Malthus.—His assailants.—Their illogical position.—Bonar on Malthus and his work.—The increase of food supplies held by Nitti to refute Malthus.—The increase of food and the decrease of births.—Mr. Spencer's biological theory—Maximum birth-rate determined by female capacity to bear children.—The pessimism of Spencer's law.—Wider definition of moral restraint.—Where Malthus failed to anticipate the future.—Economic law operative only through biological law.
Chapter III.—Declining Birth-Rate [26]
Declining birth-rates rapid and persistent.—Food cost in New Zealand.—Relation of birth-rate to prosperity before and after 1877.—Neo-Malthusian propaganda.—Marriage rates and fecundity of marriage.—Statistics of Hearts of Oak Friendly Society.—Deliberate desire of parents to limit family increase.
Chapter IV.—Means Adopted [34]
Family responsibility—Natural fertility undiminished.—Voluntary prevention and physiological knowledge.—New Zealand experience.—Diminishing influence of delayed marriage.—Practice of abortion.—Popular sympathy in criminal cases.—Absence of complicating issues in New Zealand.—Colonial desire for comfort and happiness.
Chapter V.—Causes of Declining Birth-rate [38]
Influence of self-restraint without continence.—Desire to limit families in New Zealand not due to poverty.—Offspring cannot be limited without self-restraint.—New Zealand's economic condition.—High standard of general education.—Tendency to migrate within the colony.—Diffusion of ideas.—Free social migration between all classes.—Desire to migrate upwards.—Desire to raise the standard of ease and comfort.—Social status the measure of financial status.—Social attraction of one class to next below.—Each conscious of his limitation.—Large families confirm this limitation.—The cost of the family.—The cost of maternity.—The craving for ease and luxury.—Parents' desire for their children's social success.—Humble homes bear distinguished sons.—Large number with University education in New Zealand.—No child labour except in hop and dairy districts.—Hopeless poverty a cause of high birth-rates.—High birth-rates a cause of poverty.—Fecundity depends on capacity of the female to bear children.
Chapter VI.—Ethics of Prevention [53]
Fertility the law of life.—Man interprets and controls this law.—Marriage law necessary to fix paternal responsibility.—Malthus's high ideal.—If prudence the motive, continence and celibacy violate no law.—Post-nuptial intermittent restraint.—Ethics of prevention judged by consequences.—When procreation is a good and when an evil.—Oligantrophy.—Artificial checks are physiological sins.
Chapter VII.—Who Prevent [66]
Desire for family limitation result of our social system.—Desire and practice not uniform through all classes.—The best limit, the worst do not.—Early marriages and large families.—N.Z. marriage rates.—Those who delay, and those who abstain from marriage.—Good motives mostly actuate.—All limitation implies restraint.—Birth-rates vary inversely with prudence and self-control.—The limited family usually born in early married life when progeny is less likely to be well developed.—Our worst citizens most prolific.—Effect of poverty on fecundity.—Effect of alcoholic intemperance.—Effect of mental and physical defects.—Defectives propagate their kind.—The intermittent inhabitants of Asylums and Gaols constitute the greatest danger to society.—Character the resultant of two forces—motor impulse and inhibition.—Chief criminal characteristic is defective inhibition.—This defect is strongly hereditary.—It expresses itself in unrestrained fertility.
Chapter VIII.—The Multiplication of the Fit in Relation to the State [79]
The State's ideal in relation to the fertility of its subjects.—Keen competition means great effort and great waste of life.—If in the minds of the citizens space and food are ample multiplication works automatically.—To New Zealanders food now includes the luxuries as well as the necessities of life.—Men are driven to the alternative of supporting a family of their own or a degenerate family of defectives.—The State enforces the one but cannot enforce the other.—New Zealand taxation.—The burden of the bread-winner.—As the State lightens this burden it encourages fertility.—The survival of the unfit makes the burden of the fit.
Chapter IX.—The Multiplication of the Unfit in Relation to the State [89]
Ancient methods of preventing the fertility of the unfit.—Christian sentiment suppressed inhuman practices.—Christian care brings many defectives to the child-bearing period of life.—The association of mental and physical defects.—Who are the unfit?—The tendency of relatives to cast their degenerate kinsfolk on the State.—Our social conditions manufacture defectives and foster their fertility.—The only moral force that limits families is inhibition with prudence.—Defective self-control transmitted hereditarily.—Dr. MacGregor's cases.—The transmission of insanity.—Celibacy of the insane is the prophylaxis of insanity in the race.—The environment of the unfit.—Defectives snatched from Nature's clutches.—At the age of maturity they are left to propogate their kind.
Chapter X.—What Anæsthetics and Antiseptics Have Made Possible [103]
Education of defectives in prudence and self-restraint of little avail.—Surgical
suggestions discussed.
Chapter XI.—Tubo-ligature [114]
The fertility of the criminal a greater danger to society than his depredations.—Artificial sterility of women.—The menopause artificially induced.—Untoward results.—The physiology of the Fallopian tubes.—Their ligature procures permanent sterility.—No other results immediate or remote.—Some instances due to disease.—Defective women and the wives of defective men would welcome protection from unhealthy offspring.
Chapter XII.—Suggestions as to Application [122]
The State's humanitarian zeal protects the lives and fosters the fertility of the degenerate.—A confirmed or hereditary criminal defined.—Law on the subject of sterilization could at first be permissive.—It should apply, to begin with, to criminals and the insane.—Marriage certificates of health should be required.—Women's readiness to submit to surgical treatment for minor as well as major pelvic diseases.—Surgically induced sterility of healthy women a greater crime than abortion.—This danger not remote.
Conclusion [128]
The Fertility of the Unfit.
[INTRODUCTION.]
Biology is the Science of Life. It seeks to explain the phenomena of all life, whether animal or vegetable. Its methods are observation and experiment. It observes the tiny cell on the surface of an egg yolk, and watches it divide and multiply until it becomes a great mass of cells, which group off or differentiate, and rearrange and alter their shapes. It observes how little organs unfold themselves, or evolve out of these little cell groups—how gradual, but how unvarying the change; how one group becomes a bone, another a brain, another a muscle, to constitute in three short weeks the body of a matured chick. Those little tendons like silken threads, that run down those slender pink legs to each and every toe, and move its little joints so swiftly that we hardly see them—that little brain, no bigger than a tiny seed, in which is planted a mysterious force that impels it to set all those brand-new muscles in motion, and to dart after a fly with the swiftness of an arrow—all this wondrous mechanism, all this beauteous structure, all this perfection of function, all this adaptation to environment, have evolved from a few microscopic cells in three short weeks.
Biology is the science that observes all this, and enunciates the law that the life history of this animal cell, i.e., its history from a simple unicellular state in the egg, to its complex multicellular state in the matured chick, represents the history of the race to which the chick belongs. If we could trace that chicken back through all its ancestry, we would discover at different periods in the history of life upon the globe (about 100 million years, according to Haeckel) exactly the stages of development we found in the life history of the chick, and arrive at last at a primordial cell.
What is true of the chick is true of all life. This is the law of evolution. It is true of all plant and animal life; it is true of man as an individual; it is true of his mind as well as of his body; it is true of society as an aggregation of individuals. As men have evolved from a lower to a higher, a simple to a complex state, so they are still evolving and rising "on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things."
Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion between the rates of increase in population and food, and the consequent struggle for existence.