The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 9

growing voluntary restraint upon increase. We have already mentioned what is called birth-control in Book 8 (Chap. 8, § 6) and indicated the essence of its methods. Knowledge of them is being diffused and through the spread of this knowledge and of the ideas that promoted that spread, and through a rise in the age of marriage, an effective check on human multiplication is coming into play. The rate of increase has fallen and continues to fall in just the countries in which increase was most conspicuous half a century ago. From 1870 to 1880 the annual English birthrate averaged 35.4 per thousand living ; in 1928 it was 16.7—less than half as great. The rising birthrate turned and began to fall traceably from the time that birth-control methods became reasonably effective and the knowledge of them became widely disseminated. This breeding storm has certainly passed its maximum in the United States and all the Western European countries.

There seems to be an irresistible seeping of birth-control knowledge now throughout the world, even where all outward discussion of birth-control and all facilities for its practice are forbidden. There is a direct correlation of the standard of life with the birthrate, and no population to which these ideas and methods have come has failed to respond to them. Even in _blackest Italy, in spite of the most vigorous formal suppression of birth-control propaganda, the eloquent exhortations of the Duce to Italian womanhood and the threatenings and outrages of philoprogenitive Fascisti spread the suggestion, and the birthrate fallsunder conditions of dingy concealment, no doubt, and with much mental trouble. For some generations, and more and more universally as the modern ways and conceptions of life that are known as Westernization spread about the world, the birthrate will probably continue to fall, and it is quite possible that there may even be a marked diminution of the total human population in the concluding phases of the process.

‘That we cannot certainly prophesy. But it seems at least probable that this present human breeding storm will not have those tragic consequences in pestilence and famine that follow naturally upon the breeding storms of rodents and birds. There is enough reason to suppose that our modern productive organization, running at full time, can, for another century or more, support an even denser world population than now exists at a fairly high standard of life. But if a final disaster is to be averted, the slowing

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THE SCIENCE OF EPTFE

CHAPTER 2

down of the increase must continue until the increase ceases. Manifestly, long before man arrives at the pitch of crowding we have anticipated, other restrictive forces will come into play. As we have already suggested in our sections on Ecology, he is living at present beyond his income. He is using up capital. Coal, many necessary metals, and above all phosphorus, are being used up and not replaced. High prices and hard times will come in an intensifying form long before that phase of “standing room only,” and force this problem into the focus of human intelligence.

This breeding storm in which we are living now, unlike all other breeding storms in the world of life, may pass without a subsequent massacre. And here again the abnormality of human biology forces itself upon us. Man it seems is breeding now without selection. And if presently the problem is tackled and the increase checked effectively the phase of severe selection that is the normal sequel to a breeding storm may never occur. In which case, with a cessation of selection, there will be no further biological progress.

Confronted with this possibility, liberal thinkers are accustomed to reply that selection will still go on but that it will no longer be by killing but by relative breeding. That may or may not be so. Certain types, it seems natural to assume, will breed more abundantly than others. The most vital issue from the point of human biology is the question of what types will breed most, whether they will be the types most helpful in the progressive development of the world community and, if not, what measures are possible, advisable and desirable to replace nature’s method of selection-by-killing by an alternative method of selective reproduction—Eugenics: that is to say, the preferential breeding of the best.

It is customary to speak of negative and positive eugenics. Negative eugenics is the prevention of undesirable births. Positive eugenics is the promotion of desirable births. Except in so far as the private judgments of young people about to marry are concerned, no attempts at positive eugenics are traceable in the world about us. Most young people about to marry seem to find an ounce of flattery, or a trustworthy investment list, more directive than any eugenic ideas. But negative eugenics is already in operation. In several American states surgical sterilization—a very slight operation, the ligaturing of the oviduct or the vas deferens—is performed upon various types of mental defec-