Inferior breeds of human beings are among the greatest handicaps of our civilization. The culture and the intellectual advance of the race are the product of its best minds. Take away the most intelligent ten per cent of its population, and any

FIG. 227-Three microcephalic brothers. Mental tests showed that none of these boys gave a mental age of more than four years. There were two other microcephalic defectives in the same family and five other siblings who were normal. (After Dr. C. Bernstein.)

nation would sink to a relatively low level of intellectual productivity. Under such conditions, Greece would never have seen the Age of Pericles, nor would civilization have made its

rapid advances in the nations of modern Europe. There is no measure of the debt of humanity to Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe, or Pasteur. The best blood of a nation is its most priceless possession. To be composed of people endowed with a superior heredity of mind and body is perhaps the greatest blessing that can fall to the lot of any country. On the other hand, one of the greatest misfortunes that could afflict a country would be to be composed of such degenerate breeds of humanity as we have just described. The great bulk of the population of all countries lies between these two extremes, but it can be readily modified in the direction of either one. Which way is our own population actually going?

The answer to this question depends upon what kinds of people are producing the largest numbers of children who live to maturity. But this again depends upon two factors: the birth rate, and the death rate. In order to ascertain if the race is improving or deteriorating, we should have to be able to compare the birth rates and the death rates of the members of superior and of inferior stocks. There have been several investigations of this problem and their general results are in practical agreement in pointing to the conclusion that the better endowed stocks tend to be replaced by those of inferior heredity. Let us consider some of the evidence for this conclusion.

Most civilized countries have witnessed a decline of the birth rate during the last fifty or seventy-five years.1 In France the decline set in still earlier and it has proceeded to such an extent that the population has been nearly stationary for several years. The birth rate began to fall in Great Britain and Germany about 1876, somewhat later in Austria and Italy, and still later in Russia and the Balkan states. Nevertheless, nearly all

1 One very important aspect of the birth rate is its relation to overpopulation and the expansion of peoples. When a people is faced with the alternatives of starvation or expansion it will generally take the latter course. This frequently entails war with neighboring peoples. The pressure of population has been a chronic incentive to conflict throughout the course of human history. It has doubtless furnished the real cause of war in numerous cases in which various other reasons have been assigned.

countries in Europe increased greatly in population during the nineteenth century, partly as the result of their great industrial development, and partly on account of the reduction of the death rate which was brought about by the advances made in medicine and hygiene. The decline in the birth rate is not the result of either fewer or later marriages, since it has occurred in countries in which the marriage rate has not declined nor the average age at marriage increased. A large part of it is due to the voluntary limitation of the size of the family. This being true, it is not surprising that the greatest decline should have occurred among the more intelligent, educated, and thrifty members of the community. The several studies which have been made of the families of graduates of colleges have shown that the college-bred population does not produce enough children to rescue it from extinction. With our present death rate and marriage rate it requires three or more children per family to keep a stock from decreasing in numbers. The average number of children for the graduates of Harvard from 1860 to 1890 was a little over two per married graduate, and, for all graduates, considerably less than two. The record for Yale and several other colleges is much the same. With the graduates of women's colleges the record is still lower. Only a little over fifty per cent of women graduates marry at all, and those who marry produce, on the average, less than three children per family. Our college-bred men and women are coming to constitute a larger and larger percentage of the population, and in mentality, they certainly stand somewhat above the general average of humanity. High-school graduates have larger families than the graduates of colleges, but they have smaller families than those who have had no more than a common-school education. The professional classes-lawyers, doctors, etc.— have very small families, and the same is true of successful men of affairs. Cattell has found that the average size of the completed family among American men of science is 1.88 children.

The decline of the birth rate which began in the more culti

vated strata of society has been extending gradually to other classes. Among the skilled artisans and the more thrifty and enterprising workers in general, the practice of family limitation has been steadily growing. The custom of restricting the birth supply has had the least effect upon the more ignorant and improvident, who go on reproducing their kind without restraint in the primitive animal fashion. Among those who attempt to avoid the responsibilities and burdens of more children, recourse is only too frequently had to abortion. Since it involves the destruction of an embryo which is developing into a human being, abortion, unless necessary to safeguard the life of the mother, is adjudged a crime in most civilized countries. Nevertheless, there is much evidence that the traffic in this form of child murder is a flourishing business, and that it is the cause of much damage to the health of women who take this way of escaping from the responsibilities of maternity. Miss Elderton, who has made a valuable study of the causes of the decline of the birth rate in the north of England, finds that abortions and other means of restricting the family are coming to be widely practiced among the more thrifty workers. On the other hand, "the poorest classes of all, those who cannot provide for themselves, but seek public dispensaries and maternity charities for attendance, do not appear to limit their families, for very many have large families running up to thirteen or more."

A study by Professor Karl Pearson and his colleagues of the relation between size of family and the quality of the parents, brought out the fact that a large number of children was correlated with low rent, dirty houses, poor food, low wages of the father, and irregularity of employment. If we should explain the low rent and poor food as in part the result of family size, there would seem to be no reason why a large family should cause wages to be low, or employment to be irregular. Wages are at least a rough measure of the intelligence and efficiency of the worker, and the fact that low wages and large families go together is doubtless because both result from the ignorance and improvidence of the fathers.

When we come to the positively feeble-minded, we find that fecundity is usually quite unrestrained. Whetham remarks:

Feeble-minded women, whether married or unmarried, are remarkably fertile. The workhouse records frequently note that five, six, or seven children have been born before the mother is twenty-five years of age, and she herself may have commenced childbearing at fifteen years of age or even younger. Most of these children inherit the mental condition of their parents, and where both parents are known to be feeble-minded, there is no record of their having given birth to a normal child. In one workhouse there were sixteen feeble-minded women who had produced between them 116 children with a large proportion of mental defect. Out of one such family of fourteen, only four could be trained to do remunerative work.

With regard to the fertility of feeble-minded stocks, it has been pointed out that the feeble-minded children from the degenerate families, who use the special schools in London, come, sometimes two or more at a time, from households averaging about seven offspring, whereas the average number of children in the families who now use the public elementary schools is about four.

Dr. Wilmarth, in speaking of the transmission of mental defect, has incidentally furnished an illustration of the high fertility of feeble-minded stocks:

Two children from one family are under our care. From the sheriff, who brought the children, and an intelligent neighbor, I learned that the mother was weak mentally. The father seldom worked but managed to raise his family on what he could obtain in other ways. Not one of the eighteen children was a desirable member of society. The girls drifted into disreputable lives; the boys were idlers and thieves with no moral sense. I know a couple in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, whose nine children were all idiots of low grade. A family in eastern Wisconsin, the father and mother are both feeble-minded; at least seven of the eight children are imbeciles; five we have cared for. A couple in this state have nine children, all subnormal, and there are several, to my knowledge, in collateral branches of the family. One feeble-minded woman, now removed from the state, had by different men eighteen children in nineteen years, she alleges. I have seen