Hakkins: The Declining Birth Rate 



367 



BUSINESS PROMOTERS 

 PROFESSIONAL CLASSES 

 SMALL BUSINESSMEN 

 SOFT HAND WORKERS 

 ARTISANS AND 

 SKILLED WORKERS 



'-UNSKILLED 



MANUAL LABORERS 



DEFECTIVES 



WHAT A EUGENIC REFORM WOULD MEAN 



The accompanying charts show respectively the distribution of economic classes in present 

 society (at the left) and the distribution that would result were size of family to be roughly 

 proportional to income and native ability; were also negative eugenics to be used to 

 prevent the multiplication of the defective; and were the educational opportunities of the 

 industrial classes greatly increased (at the right). These charts are merely suggestive: 

 proportions and class designations are not exact. (Fig. 18.) 



is to be done is another matter. Rome's 

 efforts to preserve her best blood by legal 

 requirements failed. Recent French 

 proposals include the education at 

 public expense of every seventh child in 

 a family; the taxation of bachelors and 

 the exemption or abatement of taxes of 

 fathers of large families ; additional votes 

 to fathers in proportion to the size of 

 their families; a public bounty of 500 

 francs for the third and every additional 

 child. x\ll these and numerous other 

 proposals lack an essential quality — they 

 are indiscriminate and uneugenic. They 

 would probably have the sole effect of 

 increasing the proportion of the ineffi- 

 cient; they might increase numbers but 

 they would hasten degeneration. 



There are those who believe that the 

 decline in the birth-rate cannot be 

 checked; and it does seem that civiliza- 

 tion tends to commit suicide by freeing 

 the individual and enabling him to flout 

 the race. Is it possible that a race can 

 be kept alive only by maintaining a 



substrattmi of poverty-stricken, brute- 

 like creatures upon whom must rest not 

 only the weight of ceaseless toil, but the 

 burden of renewing the ever-disappear- 

 ing cultured but enervated social favor- 

 ites ? Can we destroy poverty, and with 

 it the grosser injustices of our crude 

 anarchistic social system, elevate the 

 whole mass of the nation to sharers in the 

 fruits of civilization and at the same 

 time not bring self-destruction to our 

 white blood but rather raise its quality 

 above the best the world has yet seen ? 

 If we still wish to be optimistic we may 

 reflect that ours is perhaps a period of 

 transition; that man's new knowledge 

 must ever give him added responsibility 

 as well as increased liberty; and that 

 there is much hope for both a finer social 

 order and a higher type of man in the 

 education of coming generations in what 

 is eugenically fit and in the social respon- 

 sibilities required by an altogether new 

 and momentous power. 



Need of Family Histories 



The investigation of human eugenics — that is, of the conditions under which 

 men of a high type are produced — is at present extremely hampered by want of 

 full family histories, both medical and general, extending over three or four gen- 

 erations. Believing, as I do, that human eugenics will become recognized before 

 long as a study of the highest practical importance, it seems to me that no time 

 ought to be lost in encouraging and directing a habit of compiling personal and 

 family histories. — Francis Galton: Inquiries into Human Faculty (1907). 



