zed societies. If the type of
maximum fertility is not identical with the type fittest to survive in
a given environment, then only intensive selection can keep the
community stable. If natural selection be suspended there results a
progressive change; the most fertile, whoever they are, tend to
multiply at an increasing rate. In our modern societies natural
selection has been to some extent suspended; what test have we then of
the identity of the most fertile and the most fit? It wants but very
few generations to carry the type from the fit to the unfit. The
aristocracy of the intellectual and artizan classes are not equally
fertile with the mediocre and least valuable portions of those
classes and of society as a whole. Hence if the professional and
intellectual classes are to be maintained in due proportions they must
be recruited from below. This is much more serious than would appear
at first sight. The upper middle class is the backbone of a nation,
supplying its thinkers, leaders, and organizers. This class is not a
mushroom growth, but the result of a long process of selecting the
abler and fitter members of society. The middle classes produce
relatively to the working classes a vastly greater proportion of
ability; _it is not want of education, it is the want of stock which
is at the basis of this difference_. A healthy society would have its
maximum of fertility in this class and recruit the artizan class from
the middle class rather than _vice versa_. But what do we actually
find? A growing decrease in the birth rate of the middle and upper
classes; a strong movement for restraint of fertility, and limitation
of the family, touching only the intellectual classes and the
aristocracy of the hand workers! Restraint and limitation may be most
social and at the same time most eugenic if they begin in the first
place to check the fertility of the unfit; but if they start at the
wrong end of society they are worse than useless, they are nationally
disastrous in their effects. The dearth of ability at a time of crisis
is the worst ill that can happen to a people. Sitting quietly at home,
a nation may degenerate and collapse, simply because it has given full
play to selective reproduction and not bred from its best. From the
standpoint of the patriot, no less than from that of the evolutionist
and Eugenist, differential fertility is momentous; we must
unreservedly condemn all movements for restraint of fertility which