Social progress, and a higher civilisation, we thus see, involve a
reduced birth-rate and a reduced death-rate; the fewer the children
born, the fewer the risks of death, disease, and misery to the children
that are born. The fact that civilisation involves small families is
clearly shown by the tendency of the educated and upper social classes
to have small families. As the proletariat class becomes educated and
elevated, disciplined to refinement and to foresight--as it were
aristocratised--it also has small families. Civilisational progress is
here in a line with biological progress. The lower organisms spawn
their progeny in thousands, the higher mammals produce but one or two
at a time. The higher the race the fewer the offspring.
Thus diminution in quantity is throughout associated with augmentation
in quality. Quality rather than quantity is the racial ideal now set
before us, and it is an ideal which, as we are beginning to learn, it
is possible to cultivate, both individually and socially. The day is
coming, as Engel remarks in his useful book on _The Elements of Child
Protection_, when fatherhood and motherhood will only be permitted to
the strong. That is why the new science of eugenics or racial hygiene
is acquiring so immense an importance. In the past racial selection has
been carried out crudely by the destructive, wasteful, and expensive
method of elimination, through death. In the future it will be carried
out far more effectively by conscious and deliberate selection,
exercised not merely before birth, but before conception and even
before mating.
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