CONTRA-SELECTION IN ENGLAND 



CORA B. S. HODSON 



London, England 



It is interesting that the multiplication of the socially inadequate is, for 

 Western civilisation, a modern phenomenon. To what extent it may have 

 occurred in early civilisations must remain somewhat problematical. The 

 theories concerning the cause of the fall of former civilisations include the 

 reduction of fertility of the leading class or race, which appears to have 

 occurred regularly whenever society was sufficiently organised for a great 

 accumulation of wealth. As the ruling classes are on the whole the wealthi- 

 est classes, it is illogical to presuppose (as many of the less historically- 

 minded sociologists do today), that wealth and loss of fecundity are directly 

 correlated. This idea comes, probably, from Galton's interesting study 

 of the extinction of families who owed their wealth to marriage with heir- 

 esses, heiresses representing an infecund stock. In most nations this would 

 apply only to a small proportion of the ruling class. The present infertility 

 of the upper strata may readily enough be explained by the sudden rise 

 in the standard of living and the consequent rise in expenditure on children, 

 which is proportionally greater for the well-to-do than for the poor. 



Round about 1850 the wealthy throughout Western civilisation had, on 

 the whole, the largest surviving families and must thus be reckoned as a 

 fecund group. Fecundity has been shown to be a highly heritable trait 

 and fifty years is too short a time for an inborn character to be selected out. 

 In England there has been a very rapid spread in the control of the numbers 

 in family, starting with the wealthier and reaching now through every grade 

 to the skilled artisan and competent and ambitious workman. Even today 

 studies of birth rates by class in France, as well as studies of the wealthier 

 classes in America, published in Huntington and Whitney's "Builders of 

 America" demonstrate that in every group the most successful and the 

 wealthiest have the largest families within their own stratum. Carr- 

 Saunders has given the clue to the earlier condition in which the wage- 

 earning classes had a lower fertility than the wealthy — a condition which 

 persisted up to the early days of the Industrial revolution. Before the 

 simpler processes of the factory came into being, and so made children use- 

 ful as workers in their early years, employers, whether agricultural or in 



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