CONTRA-SELECTTON IN ENGLAND 373 



crafts and trades, relied on a relatively small number of employees, and all 

 these, whether as apprentices or young working people "lived in" as we 

 term the system of an employer housing his own work-people. The board 

 and lodging counted as part of the employee's earnings, and until the worker 

 had gained much skill and experience he or she had too little in the way of 

 money earnings to think of leaving the employer's roof. Thus the age of 

 marriage among the workers was late and the less competent probably 

 never rose to the skill which enabled them to make a home of their own. 

 Once the labourer or poorly-paid worker started a family, the struggle for 

 existence was keen and the death-rate in infancy and early years very high. 

 In the Bulletin of the Union for the Study of Population Problems, we have 

 already a couple of preliminary reports from an investigator among the 

 primitive villages of the Balkans, which give a picture comparable in some 

 measure to the (presumed) life figures of this pre-factory period. Although 

 in the Balkans workers are almost all small independent peasant proprietors 

 and marriage is early, the high birth-rate is countered by a very high infant 

 mortality rate, somewhere about one-third among the poorer families. 

 If to such birth and death rates we add the former late marriage-rate prev- 

 alent in Northern, middle and Western Europe, we get a picture which 

 would explain the evolution of the virile stocks of the past in Scandinavia 

 and Great Britain. Very low survival among the "socially inadequate" 

 prevented this group from increasing. The least skilled workers probably 

 also barely maintained their numbers and the slow growth of these popula- 

 tions depended on the gradual increase of the most successful types. 



Our present situation can readily be explained by the conjunction of two 

 vast social changes, the first being industrialisation, already referred to, 

 and the second, the sudden blossoming of philanthropy. This coincided 

 with the ill-founded anthropological conception of mankind as potentially 

 equal, equal that is at birth and moulded subsequently by environmental 

 conditions. The social theories of which the Marxian doctrine is the out- 

 standing example have welded these two ideas into the notion of State 

 responsibility for every individual born; thus the fine flower of private 

 charity which grew rapidly in the early part of last century paved the way 

 to the gradual formation of State schemes for the alleviation of every type 

 of human trouble. Science has played its part in making effective these 

 attempts to secure an ever-increasing survival rate for the least competent 

 types. By this reference to science I mean, of course, the growth of sani- 

 tation, hygiene and State medicine. 



England is probably the best example in the world of the disastrous 

 results of this interference with Natural Selection, for the social conditions 



