progress of the last half century, it has been augmented by the fertility of the unfit; and the maintenance in idleness and comfort of the great and increasing army of defectives constitutes the fit man's burden. The unfit in the State include all those mental and moral and physical defectives who are unable or unwilling to support themselves according to the recognised laws of human society. They include the criminal, the pauper, the idiot and imbecile, the lunatic, the drunkard, the deformed, and the diseased. We are now face to face with the startling fact that this army of defectives is increasing in numbers and relative fertility.

Consider what a burden is the criminal. Every community is more or less terrorised by him; our property is liable to be plundered, our houses invaded, our women ravished, our children murdered. To restrain him we must build gaols, and keep immense staffs of highly paid officials to tend him in confinement, and watch him when he is at liberty. Notwithstanding these, crime is rife, and is rapidly increasing. Says Douglas Morrison:—"It is perfectly well known to every serious student of criminal questions, both at home and abroad, that the proportion of habitual criminals in the criminal population is steadily on the increase, and was never so high as it is now.... The population under detention in reformatory institutions is increasing more rapidly than the growth of the community as a whole, and, as far as it is possible to see, the juvenile population in prisons is doing the same thing." Havelock Ellis ("The Criminal," p. 295), Boies, and McKim, all corroborate this testimony. "Among the three or four millions of inhabitants of London, one in every five dies in gaol, prison, or workhouse." ("Heredity and Human Progress," p. 32.)

All these defectives are prolific, and transmit their fatal taints. "In a certain family of sixteen persons, eight were born deaf and dumb, and one at least of this family transmitted the defect as far as the third generation." ("Heredity and Human Progress.") A murderer was the son of a drunkard; of three brothers, one was normal, one a drunkard, and the third was a criminal epileptic. Of his three paternal uncles, one was a murderer, one a half idiot, and one a violent character. Of his four cousins, sons of the latter, two were half idiots, one a complete idiot, and the other a lunatic.

There is an agricultural community of about 4000 in the rich and fertile district in the valley of Artena, in Italy, who have been thieves, brigands, and assassins since 1155 A.D. They were outlawed by Pope Paul IV., in 1557, but they still live and flourish in their crime, the victims of a criminal inheritance. The ratio of homicides in Italy and Artena is as 9 to 61; of assault and battery as 34 to 205; of highway robbery as 3 to 145; of theft as 47 to 111. Professor Pellman, of Bonn University, has traced the careers of a large number of defectives, and shown their cost to the State. Take this example:—A woman who was a thief, a drunkard, and a tramp for forty years of her life, had 834 descendants, 709 of whom were traced; 106 were born out of wedlock, 142 were beggars, and 64 more lived on charity. Of the women, 181 lived disreputable lives. There were in the family 76 convicts, 7 of whom were convicted of murder. In 75 years, this family cost their country in almshouses, trials, courts, prisons, and correctional establishments about £250,000. The injury inflicted by this one family on person and property was simply incalculable.

In New Zealand, the ratio of those dependent upon the State, or on public or private support, has gone up from 16.86 per thousand of population, over 15 years of age in 1878, to 23.01 in 1901. The ratio of defectives, including deaf and dumb, blind, lunatics, epileptics, paralytics, crippled and deformed, debilitated and infirm, has gone up from 5.4 per thousand, over fifteen years, in 1874, to 11.4 in 1896, declining slightly to 10.29 in 1901. The ratio of lunatics has gone up from 1.9, in 1874, to 3.4 in 1901. This is the period of the most rapid and persistent decline in the New Zealand birth-rate; and, coincident with this period, the marriage-rate went down from 8.8 per thousand in 1874, to 5.8 in 1886, and then gradually rose to 7.83 in 1901. The number of weekly rations (Parkes's standard), purchasable by the average weekly wages of an artisan in Wellington province, has gone up from 11 to 16.5 between the years 1877 and 1897. In other words, the price of food and the rate of wages in 1897 would enable an artisan to fill 5½ more mouths than he could have done at the rates prevailing in 1877.

Notwithstanding the development of civilising, Christianising, and educational institutions, crime, insanity, and pauperism are increasing with startling rapidity. The true cause is to be found deep down in biological truth. Society is breeding from defective stock. The best fit to produce the best offspring are ceasing to produce their kind, while the fertility of the worst remains undisturbed. The most striking demographical phenomenon of recent years is the declining birth-rate of civilised nations. In Germany the birth-rate has fallen from 40 to 35 per thousand of the population; in England from 35 to 30; in Ireland from 26 to 22; in France from 26 to 21; and in the United States from 36 to 30 during the last twenty years; while, in New Zealand, it has declined from 40.8, in 1880, to 25.6, in 1900. In Australia there were 47,000 less births in 1899 than would have occurred under the rates prevailing ten years ago.

There is a consensus of opinion among demographists that this decline is due to the voluntary curtailment of the family in married life. Prudence is the motive, and self-restraint the means by which this curtailment is made possible. But prudence and self-restraint are the characteristic attributes of the best citizens. They are conspicuous by their absence in the worst; and it is a matter of common observation that the hopelessly poor, the drunken and improvident, the criminal and the defective have the largest families, while those in the higher walks of life rejoice in smaller numbers. The very qualities, therefore, that make the social unit a law-abiding and useful citizen, who could and should raise the best progeny for the State, also enable him to limit his family, or escape the responsibility of family life altogether; while, on the other hand, the very qualities which make a man a social burden, a criminal, a pauper, or a drunkard—improvidence and defective inhibition—ensure that his fertility will be unrestrained, except by the checks of biological law. And it now comes about that the good citizen, who curtails his family, has the defective offspring of the bad citizen thrown upon his hands to support; and the humanitarian zeal, born of Christian sentiment, which is at flood-tide to-day, ensures that all the defectives born to the world shall not only be nursed and tended, but shall have the same opportunities of the highest possible fertility enjoyed by their defective progenitors.

A higher and nobler human happiness is attainable only through social evolution, and this comes from greater freedom of thought, from bolder enquiry, from broader experience, and from a scientific study of the laws of causation. What "is" becomes "right" from custom, but with our yearnings for a higher ideal, sentiment slowly yields to the logic of comparison, and, often wiping from our eyes the sorrows over vanishing idols, we behold broader vistas of human powers, possibilities, duties, and destiny.

As the proper study of mankind is man, influenced wholly by a desire to be useful to a society to which I am indebted for the pleasures of civilised life, I offer this brief volume as a comment on a phase of the social condition of the times, and as my conclusions regarding its interest for the future.

CHAPTER I.