ivilization,
that there has been a tendency to offer special social or pecuniary
advantages to the parents of large families. Since large families tend to
be degenerate, and to become a tax on the community, since rapid
pregnancies in succession are not only a serious drain on the strength of
the mother but are now known to depreciate seriously the quality of the
offspring, and since, moreover, it is in large families that disease and
mortality chiefly prevail, all the interests of the community are against
the placing of any premium on large families, even in the case of parents
of good stock. The interests of the State are bound up not with the
quantity but with the quality of its citizens, and the premium should be
placed not on the families that reach a certain size but on the individual
children that reach a certain standard; the attainment of this standard
could well be based on observations made from birth to the fifth year. A
premium on this basis would be as beneficial to a State as that on the
merely numerical basis is pernicious.

This consideration applies with still greater force to the proposals for
the "systematic endowment of motherhood" of which we hear more and more.
So moderate and judicious a social reformer as Mr. Sidney Webb writes: "We
shall have to face the problem of the systematic endowment of motherhood,
and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable
economic basis. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated,
and in no way honored by the State."[459] True as this statement is, it
must always be remembered that an indispensable preliminary to any
proposal for the endowment of motherhood by the State is a clear
conception of the kind of motherhood which the State requires. To endow
the reckless and indiscriminate motherhood which we see around us, to
encourage, that is, by State aid, the production of citizens a large
proportion of whom the State, if it dared, would like to destroy as unfit,
is too ridiculous a proposal to deserve discussion.[460] The only sound
reason, indeed, for the endowment of motherhood is that it would enable
the State, in its own interests, to further the natural selection of the
fit.

As to the positive qualities which the State is entitled to endow in its
encouragement of motherhood, it is still too early to speak with complete
assurance. Negative eugenics tends to be ahead of positive eugenics; it is
easier to detect bad stocks t