178 THE FAMILY AND THE NATION 



skill in manual craft will increase yet more in relative 

 importance, and in the future the need for these qualities 

 will grow faster than the population. 



Besides applying the immediate remedies required 

 to meet the superficial symptoms of present unemploy- 

 ment, we must learn to go to the root of the matter by 

 securing once more a rightly-directed selective birth- 

 rate, or be prepared for Nature to resume her own 

 ways of eliminating the unfit, after some form of social 

 cataclysm. 



The truth is that a generation which has set great 

 and unwarranted stress on success in examinations as 

 a test of individual ability, has rebelled against the far 

 truer and more profound view of continual utility and 

 prosperity in life as the test of the worth of a family. 

 While acquiescing in and encouraging the sorting-out 

 of able individuals by a purely academic method, we 

 have discountenanced or disowned the results of the 

 far severer and more searching discrimination of 

 natural selection and inheritance. From the point of 

 view of the nation, the individual is too small a unit 

 to deal with or to judge from. Even when apparently 

 sound, he may bear in him the hereditary seeds 

 of disease, crime, or mental defect. The family is 

 obviously the true scientific unit of the sociologist, the 

 only safe guide in forming any estimate of the possi- 

 bilities of the nation as a whole. 



