202 THE NEXT GENERATION 



step must be taken. It is stated as a command. It is the 

 fourth great step in the race-improvement series. Protect the 

 children before they are born. 



PROTECTION OF CHILDREN BEFORE BIRTH 



This step leads humanity into a new road, and the road 

 itself leads to race regeneration. 



Heretofore men and women have traveled the only road 

 they knew. They have lived and multiplied and passed on the 

 stream of life in ignorance of conditions affecting the welfare 

 of their descendants. By the laws of the struggle for exist- 

 ence and the survival of the fit, the most unfit died in child- 

 hood. The rest lived to become ancestors. As a result, until 

 lately each generation contained about the same proportion 

 of healthy and efficient people. 



This course of events continued for many ages. But a 

 change came. Machines were invented. Men and women 

 trooped in from the country to the factories and the mills of 

 the cities. There they were overworked and underfed. For 

 generations children and their children's children did the 

 same kind of work, lived in the same deadly environment, 

 endured the same cruelties. And each generation had less 

 vigor than the generation that went before. Because their 

 ancestors had become inferior, whole villages suffered. 



Among these people disease microbes now made havoc. 

 They killed thousands who should have been vigorous enough 

 to escape. And, worst of all, no one knew either the cause 

 of the death rate or the means of its prevention. 



When matters were at this point, in 1865, while Pasteur 

 studied silkworms in France, he discovered microscopic 

 creatures that carried disease from worm to worm. 1 



1 For full description see " Town and City," chap. xxi. 



