502 READINGS IN EVOLUTION, GENETICS, AND EUGENICS 
disease. It were better for them and for us that they had never been 
born. Many more of the unemployed have been made unemployable 
by the influence of over-crowding, to which they were subjected in their 
years of development. Is there, can there be, any real and permanent 
remedy for overcrowding, but the erection of parenthood into an act 
of personal and provident responsibility ? 
Eugenics and woman.—Take, again, the woman question. No 
one will deny that in many of its gravest forms, especially in its 
economic form, and the question of the employment of women, wisely 
or horribly, this depends (to a degree which few, I think, realize) upon 
the fact that there are now (1909), for instance, 1,300,000 women in 
excess in this country. Is it then proposed, the reader will say, by 
means of race-culture to exterminate the superfluous woman? Indeed, 
no. But is the reader aware that Nature is not responsible for the 
existence of the superfluous woman? There are more boys than girls 
born in the ratio of about 103 or 104 to 100; and Nature means them all 
to live, boys and girls alike. If they did so live, we should have merely 
the problem of the superfluous man, which would not be an economic 
problem at all. But we destroy hosts of all the children that are born, 
and since male organisms are in general less resistant than female 
organisms, we destroy a disproportionate number of boys, so that the 
natural balance of the sexes is inverted. Unlike ancient societies we 
largely practice male infanticide. Can the reader believe that there 
is any permanent and final means of arresting this wastage of child- 
life, with its singular and far-reaching consequences, other than the 
elevation of parenthood, wholly apart from the question of the selec- 
tion of parents? We shall not succeed in keeping all the children alive 
(with a trivial number of exceptions), thereby abolishing the super- 
fluous woman by keeping alive the boy who should have grown up to 
be her partner, until we greatly reduce the birth-rate; as it must and 
will be reduced when the ideal of race-culture is realized, and no child 
comes into the world that is not already loved and desired in antici- 
pation. 
Eugenics and cruelty to children.—This ideal, also, offers us in 
its realization the only complete remedy for the present ghastly cruelty 
under which so many children suffer even in Great Britain, even in the 
twentieth century. Is the reader aware that the National Society 
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children inquired into the ill-treat- 
ment or cruel neglect of 115,000 children in the year beginning April 
1st, 1906? It has been reasonably and carefully estimated that “over 
