or unfavorably affect the physical or mental condition of posterity. It gathers and coördinates statistics of all the influences that society brings to bear upon our descendants through us. Special work of this kind has, of course, been done in several directions. Lombroso and the "Italian school" made very close statistical researches into the prison population, and similar investigations have been made on various classes of defectives. But Eugenics deals with the normal as well as the abnormal type. It handles the biometrical statistics of families, schools, colleges, fraternal organizations, as well as those of the asylums, hospitals and penitentiaries, in order to determine and measure the socially controlled agencies that are in force.
The posterity-affecting agencies under social control are very numerous, and the scope of the science is therefore very great. Not only does it include the familiar environmental agencies like food, drink, housing, sanitation, occupations, but also the far more subtle factors of heredity that are brought out by a study of censuses, school-reports, Board of Health returns, and the like; tracing out inherited habits, aptitudes, abilities and physical characteristics, as they manifest themselves alike in the normal and abnormal subjects of investigation.
Now, to justify my high opinion of this science—and to point a needed moral—I am going to put before you a surprising story
Of all the agencies under social control, the one most completely and obviously under the control of society is the law. Society can make, amend, suspend, or abolish its laws at pleasure. We determine our environmental conditions largely by law. In fact, familiarity with the absolute law-making power of society makes some of us unconsciously assume that statutory law is above everything— that even the laws of Nature have to vacate when the Legislature passes a statute. A brilliant writer with a turn for epigram once mentioned to me four classes among us who seemed peculiarly liable to this delusion—the impossiblist Socialists, evangelical preachers, Prohibitionists and policemen. However witty this saying will appear, or however unscrupulous, will depend, probably, upon our own relation to the philosophy of the four classes, or any one of them. I quote it merely to show a patent extreme of our faith in the unlimited potential control of all things by statutory law, and in the absolute control by society of the law-making power.
Very well, then, here is an interesting and profitable study of the basis of our faith, and at the same time a most illuminating example of the value of the science of Eugenics. I urge it upon the attention of every reader, and, above all, upon the publicists, legislators, and social workers of the United States; because timely attention to it will save us the repetition of certain vital, and I fear irreparable, blunders that England has made; blunders that England made, moreover, by what anyone would say was the most enlightened, most humane, and most beneficent policy in her history of legislation.
Two things have been worrying England acutely for Several years. First, her birth rate is low and steadily declining. She is raising the specter of race suicide. Some statisticians say that in fifteen years, at the present rate of decline, her native population will be stationary, and she must depend on immigration to keep going.
Second, her population has not the same good physical and mental quality it used to have. The South African war made some disagreeable and shocking revelations of the impairment of the fighting stock. Percentages of lunacy, degeneration, etc., seem to show an increased deterioration in the quality as well as quantity of dependable English nerve, brain, and muscle.
We will consider separately the birth rate of three representative sections of England, as follows:
The birth rate of Bradford, Manchester, Bolton, and Leeds. These are typical industrial towns, manufacturing centers like Lowell and Fall River. Bradford manufactures woolens, and formerly employed great numbers of women and children in the factories. The other cities are largely in textile manufacturing, and employed great quantities of female labor and child labor.
The birth-rate line of all these towns exhibits the same characteristic. It begins to fall about 1877 and declines continuously and sharply to the present time. In 1852 the wives of Bradford bore a child once in four years; now they bear a child once in ten years. The number of births per family has fallen off about one-half. Allowing a 30 per cent. child-mortality, the native population of Bradford is practically stationary at the present time.
The most unreflecting glance at the birthrate line of Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, and Bolton, would suggest the query, Something must have happened in England about 1877 to affect the birth rate of factory towns,— what was it?
- The birth rate of Cornwall, an agricultural,
