October 31, 1901] 



NA TURE 



661 



Class C are supported by intermittent earnings ; they are a 

 hard-working people, but have a very bad character for improvi- 

 dence and shiftlessness. In Class D the earnings are regular, 

 but at the low rate of twenty-one shillings or less a week, 

 so none of them rise above poverty, though none are very 

 poor. D and C together correspond to the whole of s combined 

 with the lower fifth of r. The next class, E, is the largest of 

 any, and comprises all those with regular standard earnings of 

 twenty-two to thirty shillings a week. This class is the recog- 

 nised field for all forms of cooperation and combination ; in 

 short for trades unions. It corresponds to the upper four-fifths 

 of r and the lower four-fifths of R. It is therefore essentially the 

 mediocre class, standing as far below the highest in civic worth 

 as it stands above the lowest class with its criminals and semi- 

 criminals. Next above this large mass of mediocrity comes the 

 honourable class F, which consists of better paid artisans and 

 foremen. These are able to provide adequately for old age, 

 and their sons become clerks and so forth. G is the lower 

 middle class of shop-keepers, small employers, clerks and sub- 

 ordinate professional men, who as a rule are hard-working, 

 energetic and sober. F and G combined correspond to the 

 upper fifth of R and the whole of S, and are, therefore, a 

 counterpart to D and C. All above G are put together by Mr. 

 Booth into one class H, which corresponds to our T, U, V and 

 above, and is the counterpart of his two lowermost classes, A 

 and B. So far, then, as these figures go, civic worth is dis- 

 tributed in fair approximation to the normal law of frequency. 

 We also see that the classes /, «, v and below are undesirables. 



Worth of Children.— Thft brains of the nation lie in the 

 higher of our classes. If such people as would be classed W or 

 X could be distinguishable as children and procurable by money 

 in order to be reared as Englishmen, it would be a cheap 

 bargain for the nation to buy them at the rate of many hundred 

 or some thousands of pounds per head. Dr. Farr, the eminent 

 statistician, endeavoured to estimate the money worth of an 

 average baby born to the wife of an Essex labourer and thence- 

 forward living during the usual time and in the ordinary way of 

 his class. Dr. Farr, with accomplished actuarial skill, capital- 

 ised the value at the child's birth of two classes of events, the 

 one the cost of maintenance while a child and when helpless 

 through old age, the other its earnings as boy and man. On 

 balancing the two sides of the account the value of the baby was 

 found to be five pounds. On a similar principle, the worth of 

 an X-class baby would be reckoned in thousands of pounds. 

 Some such " talented " folk fail, but most succeed, and many 



succeed greatly. They found great industries, establish vast 

 undertakings, increase the wealth of multitudes and amass large 

 fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, 

 are the guides and light of the nation, raising its tone, enlighten- 

 ing its difficulties and imposing its ideals. The great gain that 

 England received through the in-.migration of the Huguenots 

 would be insignificant to what she would derive from an annual 

 addition of a few hundred children of the classes W and X. I 

 have tried, but not yet succeeded to my satisfaction, to make an 

 approximate estimate of the worth of a child at birth according 

 to the class he is destined to occupy when adult. It is an 

 eminently important subject for future investigators, for the 

 amount of care and cost that might profitably be expended in 

 improving the race clearly depends on its result. 



Descent of Qualities in a Population. — Let us now endeavour 

 to obtain a correct understanding of the way in which the vary- 

 ing qualities of each generation are derived from those of its 

 predecessor. How many, for example, of the V class in the off- 

 spring come respectively from the V, U, T, S and other classes 

 of parentage ? The means of calculating this question for a 

 normal population are given fully in my " Natural Inheritance." 

 There are three main senses in which the word parentage might 

 be used. They differ widely, so the calculations must be modified 

 accordingly, (i) The amount of the quality or faculty in question 

 may be known in each parent. (2) It may be known in only one 

 parent. (3) The two parents may belong to the same class, a 

 V-class father in the scale of male classification always marry- 

 ing a V-class mother, occupying identically the same position 

 in the scale of female classification. 



I select this last case to work out as being the one with which 

 we shall here be chiefly concerned. It has the further merit of 

 escaping some tedious preliminary details about converting female 

 faculties into their corresponding male equivalents, before men 

 and women can be treated statistically on equal terms. I shall 

 assume in what follows that we are dealing with an ideal popu- 

 lation, in which all marriages are equally fertile, and which is 

 statistically the same in successive generations both in numbers 

 and in qualities, so many per cent, being always this, so many 

 always that, and so on. Further, I shall take no notice of off- 

 spring who die before they reach the age of marriage, nor shall 

 I regard the slight numerical inequality of the sexes, but will 

 simply suppose that each parentage produces one couplet of 

 grown-up filials, an adult man and an adult woman. 



The result is shown to the nearest whole per thousand in the 

 diagram up to " U and above," and in the table up to " V and 



Table U\.— Descent of Qualities in a Population. (The difference between the sexes only affects t/ie value of the Unit of tlie 



Scale of Distribution). 

 Conditions.— (I) Parents to be always alike in class, (2) Statistics of population to continue unchanged, (3) Normal Law of 



Frequency to be applicable throughout. 



iVo/f— The agreement in dislribution between fathers (or mot/iers) and sons (or Jnuff/tlers) is e.\act to the nearest whole percentage. The slight ^ 

 discrepancy in the ten-thousindths is mainly due to the classes bsing too few and too wide; theoretically they should be e.\tremely numerous and^ 

 narrow. 



NO. 1670, VOL. 64] 



