rate as a whole, however, is ample; it is the death rate that is significant and appalling. When we remember that one-third of all the babies born die before they reach the age of five years; and that the deaths of babies under one year of age comprise about one-fourth of the total death-roll; and that fully one-half of all these deaths are needless and unnecessary, wherein is the wisdom of working for a higher birth rate if it is merely that more may die?
The majority of babies are born physically healthy, but because of our destructive process, we proceed to annihilate hundreds of thousands of them yearly, and because of defective environment and education we render thousands of others, including the fit and unfit, inefficient and incompetent as propagating factors. It is to remove this disastrous stigma on our intelligence that we have been forced to study the conditions which the eugenic idea represents. When these principles are understood and believed, and when they are acted upon, infant mortality will cease to exist.
It was the design of the Creator that human motherhood should be an exalted occupation. He placed in her care to nurture and to love, the most helpless living thing. Few have regarded a baby from this viewpoint and fewer still understand its supreme significance. That it is the most utterly helpless thing possessing life is a self-evident fact, and that it should be destined to be King of all mammalian tribes as well as Lord of all the earth is a superlative paradox. Because of its utter inability to care for itself it is more in need of care than any other representative of the animal world. It is not only in need of immediate care, but it demands care longer than the young of any other species.
It stands to reason, therefore, that the function of motherhood must be reckoned with in any scheme of race regeneration; that it must be provided with the most favorable environment; and that it must be relieved of any condition which would materially retard the meeting of the obligation to its fullest possible extent. In an ideal eugenic sense the state must ensure sustenance to those deprived of ample food and raiment, and science
must continue to solve the problem of a fitter sanitary and hygienic environment for the congested and densely populated zones of habitation. Philanthropy must not continue to be wholly misdirected, it must extend its aid to the deserving healthy and fit, as well as to be exclusively the protecting agency of the diseased and unfit. If life is the only wealth, and the preservation of childhood the highest duty of society and the state,—which it would seem to be, since the continuance and preservation of the race is obviously essential to the continuance of the state itself,—the life of every child must be considered an economic as well as a moral trust. If, therefore, every child is sacred, every mother is equally sacred. If every child is to be cared for, every mother must be cared for. If the state cannot afford to provide for what is imperatively essential to its own continuance, it might as well go out of existence, as it inevitably will in the end on any other basis, and as all preceding states have done.
Mothers must not be dependent upon their children's labor for their maintenance, because if children are compelled to work, they will not be able to work in the future,—and adult efficiency is necessary to the well-being of the individual, the race, and the state.
No mother should work, because in the care of her children she is already doing the supreme work. The proper care of children is so continuous and exacting a task, and of such importance to posterity, that it must be regarded as the highest and foremost work—and adequate in itself—and its efficiency must not be hampered by mothers having to do anything else.
Motherhood must not be financially insecure, because this would defeat its eugenic purpose. Society, therefore, as a matter of self-preservation, must ensure to woman her mental and economic security. Civilization's margin is large enough to provide this. We spend large amounts on luxuries and evils which are contrary to the genesis of self-preservation, while motherhood is its basic necessity. When public opinion is educated in the essentials of eugenics much of this can be, and will be diverted to a nobler purpose. The total cost
necessary to ensure the adequate care of dependent motherhood would be a mere fraction of the national expenditure, and not a tithe of what we spend in pension allowances yearly. The latter is regarded as an honorable debt and is at best the direct product of a decadent ideal, while motherhood constitutes the very germ of the only altruistic idealism for all the future.
We concede, therefore, that the children and the mothers must be provided for, not only as a product of the true construction of the ethics of sociology, but in obedience to the fundamental law of a moral system of eugenics. We must go further and assert that children must be cared for through the mother. It has been the practice to divorce the improvident mother from her dependent children. This has been demonstrated to be not only an altruistic fallacy. It has proved to be an economic blunder.