Read Ebook: The Fertility of the Unfit by Chapple W A William Allan Waddell Rutherford Commentator

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INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Education of defectives in prudence and self-restraint of little avail.--Surgical suggestions discussed.

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.

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 p. 124

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.

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.

In a state of nature the weaklings perish. If man interferes with this state of nature in the lower animals, he may make a selection and cultivate some particular attribute. This is artificial selection, and is best exemplified in the experiments with pigeons. Pasteur saved the silk industry of France, and perhaps of the whole world, by the application of this law of artificial selection. The disease of silkworms, known as Pebrine, was spreading with ruinous rapidity in France. Pasteur demonstrated that the germ of the disease could be detected in the blood of affected moths by the aid of the microscope. He proved that the eggs of diseased moths produced unhealthy worms, and he advised that the eggs of each moth be kept apart, until the moth was examined for germs. If these were found, the eggs were to be burned. Thus the eggs of unhealthy moths were never hatched, and artificial selection of healthy stock stamped out a disease, and saved a great industry.

All the departments of human knowledge have been placed under contribution to man's necessity, and longer life, better health, and more food and clothing for less work, are the blessings on his head to-day.

While the burden has been lessened by the industrial and scientific progress of the last half century, it has been augmented by the fertility of the unfit; and the maintenance in idleness and comfort of the great and increasing army of defectives constitutes the fit man's burden. The unfit in the State include all those mental and moral and physical defectives who are unable or unwilling to support themselves according to the recognised laws of human society. They include the criminal, the pauper, the idiot and imbecile, the lunatic, the drunkard, the deformed, and the diseased. We are now face to face with the startling fact that this army of defectives is increasing in numbers and relative fertility.

Consider what a burden is the criminal. Every community is more or less terrorised by him; our property is liable to be plundered, our houses invaded, our women ravished, our children murdered. To restrain him we must build gaols, and keep immense staffs of highly paid officials to tend him in confinement, and watch him when he is at liberty. Notwithstanding these, crime is rife, and is rapidly increasing. Says Douglas Morrison:--"It is perfectly well known to every serious student of criminal questions, both at home and abroad, that the proportion of habitual criminals in the criminal population is steadily on the increase, and was never so high as it is now.... The population under detention in reformatory institutions is increasing more rapidly than the growth of the community as a whole, and, as far as it is possible to see, the juvenile population in prisons is doing the same thing." Havelock Ellis , Boies, and McKim, all corroborate this testimony. "Among the three or four millions of inhabitants of London, one in every five dies in gaol, prison, or workhouse."

All these defectives are prolific, and transmit their fatal taints. "In a certain family of sixteen persons, eight were born deaf and dumb, and one at least of this family transmitted the defect as far as the third generation." A murderer was the son of a drunkard; of three brothers, one was normal, one a drunkard, and the third was a criminal epileptic. Of his three paternal uncles, one was a murderer, one a half idiot, and one a violent character. Of his four cousins, sons of the latter, two were half idiots, one a complete idiot, and the other a lunatic.

In New Zealand, the ratio of those dependent upon the State, or on public or private support, has gone up from 16.86 per thousand of population, over 15 years of age in 1878, to 23.01 in 1901. The ratio of defectives, including deaf and dumb, blind, lunatics, epileptics, paralytics, crippled and deformed, debilitated and infirm, has gone up from 5.4 per thousand, over fifteen years, in 1874, to 11.4 in 1896, declining slightly to 10.29 in 1901. The ratio of lunatics has gone up from 1.9, in 1874, to 3.4 in 1901. This is the period of the most rapid and persistent decline in the New Zealand birth-rate; and, coincident with this period, the marriage-rate went down from 8.8 per thousand in 1874, to 5.8 in 1886, and then gradually rose to 7.83 in 1901. The number of weekly rations , purchasable by the average weekly wages of an artisan in Wellington province, has gone up from 11 to 16.5 between the years 1877 and 1897. In other words, the price of food and the rate of wages in 1897 would enable an artisan to fill 5 1/2 more mouths than he could have done at the rates prevailing in 1877.

Notwithstanding the development of civilising, Christianising, and educational institutions, crime, insanity, and pauperism are increasing with startling rapidity. The true cause is to be found deep down in biological truth. Society is breeding from defective stock. The best fit to produce the best offspring are ceasing to produce their kind, while the fertility of the worst remains undisturbed. The most striking demographical phenomenon of recent years is the declining birth-rate of civilised nations. In Germany the birth-rate has fallen from 40 to 35 per thousand of the population; in England from 35 to 30; in Ireland from 26 to 22; in France from 26 to 21; and in the United States from 36 to 30 during the last twenty years; while, in New Zealand, it has declined from 40.8, in 1880, to 25.6, in 1900. In Australia there were 47,000 less births in 1899 than would have occurred under the rates prevailing ten years ago.

There is a consensus of opinion among demographists that this decline is due to the voluntary curtailment of the family in married life. Prudence is the motive, and self-restraint the means by which this curtailment is made possible. But prudence and self-restraint are the characteristic attributes of the best citizens. They are conspicuous by their absence in the worst; and it is a matter of common observation that the hopelessly poor, the drunken and improvident, the criminal and the defective have the largest families, while those in the higher walks of life rejoice in smaller numbers. The very qualities, therefore, that make the social unit a law-abiding and useful citizen, who could and should raise the best progeny for the State, also enable him to limit his family, or escape the responsibility of family life altogether; while, on the other hand, the very qualities which make a man a social burden, a criminal, a pauper, or a drunkard--improvidence and defective inhibition--ensure that his fertility will be unrestrained, except by the checks of biological law. And it now comes about that the good citizen, who curtails his family, has the defective offspring of the bad citizen thrown upon his hands to support; and the humanitarian zeal, born of Christian sentiment, which is at flood-tide to-day, ensures that all the defectives born to the world shall not only be nursed and tended, but shall have the same opportunities of the highest possible fertility enjoyed by their defective progenitors.

A higher and nobler human happiness is attainable only through social evolution, and this comes from greater freedom of thought, from bolder enquiry, from broader experience, and from a scientific study of the laws of causation. What "is" becomes "right" from custom, but with our yearnings for a higher ideal, sentiment slowly yields to the logic of comparison, and, often wiping from our eyes the sorrows over vanishing idols, we behold broader vistas of human powers, possibilities, duties, and destiny.

As the proper study of mankind is man, influenced wholly by a desire to be useful to a society to which I am indebted for the pleasures of civilised life, I offer this brief volume as a comment on a phase of the social condition of the times, and as my conclusions regarding its interest for the future.

THE PROBLEM STATED.

A century has passed since Malthus made his immortal contribution to the supreme problem of all ages and all people, but the whole aspect of the population question has changed since his day. The change, however, was anticipated by the great economist, and predicted in the words:--"The history of modern civilisation is largely the history of the gradual victory of the third check over the two others" . The third check is moral restraint and the two others vice and misery.

The statistics of all civilized nations show a gradual and progressive decline in the birth-rate much more marked of recent years. In Germany, between the years 1875 and 1899, it has diminished from 40 to 35.9 per thousand of the population. In England and Wales, it dropped from 35 to 29.3 during the same time; in Ireland, from 26 to 22.9; in France, from 26 to 21.9; in the United States of America the decline has been from 36 to 30; while in New Zealand it gradually and persistently declined from 40.8 in 1880 to 25.6 in 1900.

During the period, 1875-1890, the rapid strides made in industry and production have been unparallelled in the history of the world. Wealth has accumulated on all sides, and production and distribution have far outrun the needs and demands of population. To-day food is far more abundant, cheaper, and therefore more accessible to all classes of the people than it was 50 years ago, and coincident with this rapid and abundant increase in those things which go to supply the necessities, the comforts, and even the luxuries of life, there has been a constant and uniform decline in the birth-rate, and this decrease is even more conspicuous in those nations in which the rate of production has been most pronounced. It would even be true to say that the birth-rate during recent years is in inverse proportion to the rate of production.

Contrary to the expectations arising out of the famous progressions, wealth and production have increased and the birth-rate has decreased. It is the purpose of this work to show what are the causes that have led to this decline, that those causes are not equally operative through all classes of the people, and that the chief cause of the decline of the birth-rate is the desire on the part of both sexes to limit the number they have to support and educate. The considerations that lead up to, and, to some extent, justify this desire, will be discussed later.

The fact remains that an increasingly large number of people have come to the conclusion that the burden and responsibility of family obligations limit their enjoyments in life, their ambition, and even their scope for usefulness, and have discovered, through the spread of physiological information, means by which marriage may be entered upon without necessarily incurring these responsibilities and limitations.

It is the knowledge of these physiological laws and the practice of rules arising out of that knowledge, that account for the declining birth-rate of civilized nations.

If it be true that the birth-rate is controlled by a voluntary effort on the part of married people to limit their families, and that that effort implies self restraint and self denial, it would not be too much to claim that those most capable of exercising self-control and with the strongest motives for such exercise, are those most responsible for the declining birth-rate, and that those with least self-control and the fewest motives for exercising the control they have, are most likely to have the normal number of children.

It has already been suggested, that the desire to limit families is due to a consciousness of responsibility on the part of prospective parents. They realise the stress of competition in the struggle for existence, they are anxious for their own pecuniary and social stability, and even more anxious that the children, for whose birth they are responsible, should be provided with the necessities and comforts of life which health and development require. They are eager, too, that their children should be equipped with a good education, and thus be given a fair advantage in the race of life.

To the great mass of people this is possible only when the numbers of the family are limited. As the numbers of the family increase, the difficulties of clothing and feeding and educating increase, and each member is the poorer for every birth, and in this sense an increasing birth-rate is a cause of poverty. The sense in which poverty causes a high birth-rate will be dealt with later on.

It will be readily conceded, that those actuated by the motives just considered, those with the keenest sense of responsibility in life, those capable of exercising the self-restraint which family limitation requires, constitute the best type of citizens in any community. From such the State has good reason to expect the best stock.

It is one purpose of this work to show that this class, which can and should produce the best in the largest numbers, is being overwhelmed with the burden of supporting an ever-increasing number of incapables, and, largely in consequence of this increasing burden and responsibility, are unwilling to produce, because they are unable adequately to support their own kind.

There is a class in every large community, whose sense of responsibility in life is at zero, whose self-control is substituted by the law and its sanctions, and whose modes and habits of life are little better than those of the lower animals. Their appetites are stronger, their desires, though fewer, are more intense, and their self-control less easily and less frequently exerted than those in the highest planes of life.

In the first place then they have less desire to limit their families, and less power to exercise the self-restraint that is necessary to do so. Less sense of responsibility is attached to the rearing of a family, whilst the education of their children gives them little or no concern. They entertain no ambition that members of their family should compete in the struggle for social status. Their instincts and their impulses are their guide in all things. They marry early, and procreation is unrestrained except by the hardships of life.

This constitutes a numerous class in every large community, and includes the criminal, the drunkard, and the pauper, and many defectives such as epileptics and imbeciles. Now all these propagate their kind. The checks to the increase of this class, are the checks which are common to the lower animals, and which were elaborated in his first essay by Malthus. They are vice and misery.

If it were not for moral restraint , but restraint in the wider sense, within as well as without the marriage bond, and including all artificial checks to conception, these two checks, vice and misery, would absolutely control the population of the world.

The mind of man has added to the checks which control increase in the lower animals, a new check, which applies to, and can be exercised only by himself, and the problem is, how far will misery and vice as checks to the population be eliminated, and moral restraint take their places? And if this restraint must control and determine the population of the future how far will its exercise affect the moral and mental evolution of the race?

If moral restraint with the consequent limitations of families is the peculiar characteristic of the best people in the state, and the absence of this characteristic expressing itself in normal fertility is peculiar to the worst people of the state, the future of the race may be divined, by reference to the history of the great nations of antiquity.

An accumulating amount of evidence shows that society is face to face with this grave aspect of the population question. The birth-rate of the unfit is steadily maintained. Improved conditions of life increase the number that arrive at maturity and enter the procreative period, so that not only are defectives born into the world at a constant rate, but sanitary laws and a growing impatience with the sufferings of the poor, tend so to improve their conditions of life, as to increase their birth-rate and their chances of arriving at adult life.

Shortly stated then, the problem that society has to solve is this,--The birth-rate is rapidly declining amongst the most fit to produce the best offspring, while it is steadily maintained amongst the least fit, so that the relative proportion of the unfit born into the world is annually increasing.

What should be the State's attitude to this problem, and how it should attempt to solve it will be discussed in detail in a subsequent chapter. Let it suffice to say now, that the right of the State to interfere directly with the limitation of families amongst the best classes would find few advocates amongst reformers.

The right of the State to say, however, that the criminal, the drunkard, the diseased, and the pauper, shall not propagate their kind should be stoutly maintained by all rational men.

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