502 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 



disease. It were better for them and for us that they had never been 

 born. Many more of the unemployed have been made unemployable 

 by the influence of over-crowding, to which they were subjected in their 

 years of development. Is there, can there be, any real and permanent 

 remedy for overcrowding, but the_erection of parenthood into an act 

 of personal and provident responsibility ? 



Eugenics and woman. — Take, again, the woman question. No 

 one will deny that in many of its gravest forms, especially in its 

 economic form, and the question of the employment of women, wisely 

 or horribly, this depends (to a degree which few, I think, realize) upon 

 the fact that there are now (1909), for instance, 1,300,000 women in 

 excess in this country. Is it then proposed, the reader will say, by 

 means of race-culture to exterminate the superfluous woman ? Indeed, 

 no. But is the reader aware that Nature is not responsible for the 

 existence of the superfluous woman ? There are more boys than girls 

 born in the ratio of about 103 or 104 to 100; and Nature means them all 

 to live, boys and girls alike. If they did so live, we should have merely 

 the problem of the superfluous man, which would not be an economic 

 problem at all. But we destroy hosts of all the children that are born, 

 and since male organisms are in general less resistant than female 

 organisms, we destroy a disproportionate number of boys, so that the 

 natural balance of the sexes is inverted. Unlike ancient societies we 

 largely practice male infanticide. Can the reader beheve that there 

 is any permanent and final means of arresting this wastage of child- 

 life, with its singular and far-reaching consequences, other than the 

 elevation of parenthood, wholly apart from the question of the selec- 

 tion of parents ? We shall not succeed in keeping all the children alive 

 (with a trivial number of exceptions), thereby abolishing the super- 

 fluous woman by keeping alive the boy who should have grown up to 

 be her partner, until we greatly reduce the birth-rate; as it must and 

 will be reduced when the ideal of race-culture is realized, and no child 

 comes into the world that is not already loved and desired in antici- 

 pation. 



Eugenics and cruelty to children. — ^This ideal, also, offers us in 

 its realization the only complete remedy for the present ghastly cruelty 

 under which so many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the 

 twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the National Society 

 for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children inquired into the ill-treat- 

 ment or cruel neglect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 

 I St, 1906 ? It has been reasonably and carefully estimated that " over 



