60 HEREDITY AND SOCIETY 



25 per thousand. Clearly some new cause is here 

 at work. 



When we examine the question in detail, and investi- 

 gate the decline in the birth-rate, not in the nation as 

 a whole, but in selected classes, we arrive at even 

 more striking results. 



Mr Sidney Webb has dealt with the returns of 

 certain of the Friendly Societies which provide " lying- 

 in" benefits. In the "Hearts of Oak" Society, the 

 claims to this benefit rose from 2176 in the year 1866 

 to 2472 in 1880 per 10,000 members. In the year 

 1904 they had fallen to 1165 per 10,000 a drop to 

 less than half the number of claims made twenty-four 

 years previously. This is a fall three times as great 

 as the fall for the whole of England and Wales for 

 the same period. A smaller Friendly Society gave 

 a decline of 56 per cent, in the same time. Now the 

 members of these Friendly Societies are a specially 

 selected class. They are in receipt of good wages, 

 and their membership of such a Society shows them 

 to be thrifty and far-seeing. They are for the most 

 part of the skilled artisan type and, to some extent, 

 constitute an aristocracy of labour. The loss to the 

 State of some thirty-eight thousand additional children, 

 which would have been born to the members of these 

 two Friendly Societies alone had their old rate of re- 

 production continued, cannot but be regarded as a 

 serious matter. The hereditary qualities of these child- 

 ren might be expected to be good, and there was 

 every prospect of their becoming useful citizens. 



Another section of the community may be studied 

 in the pages of Who's Who, an annual publication 



