vice and misery, as checks to
increase, reign supreme, but as no other check exists, fertility is at
its maximum, and keeps close up on the heels of the positive checks.

The State in her humanitarian sympathy, and in New Zealand it is
extravagant, puts forth every effort to improve the conditions of its
"submerged tenth." Insanitary conditions are improved, the rooms by law
enlarged, the air is sweetened, the water is purified, the homes are
drained. The delicate and diseased are taken to our hospitals, the deaf
and blind to our deaf-mute institutions, the deformed and the fatherless
to our orphan homes. And all are carefully nursed as tender precious
plants. They are snatched from Nature's clutch and reared as prize stock
are reared and kept in clover, till they can propagate their kind.

We feed and clothe the unfit, however unfit, and then encourage their
procreation, and as soon as they are matured we foster their fertility.

No want of human sympathy for the poor unfortunates of our race is in
these words expressed,--a statement simply of the inevitable
consequences of unscientific and anti-social methods of dealing with the
degenerate.

No State can afford to shut its eyes to the magnitude of this problem.
The procreation of the unfit must be faced and grappled with. And the
greater the decline in the birth-rate of our best stock, the more urgent
does the solution of the problem become. For is not the proportion of
the unfit to the fit yearly increasing!

It has become the most pressing duty of the State, in face of the great
change that has so rapidly come over our natural increase, to declare
that the procreation of the unfit shall cease, or at least, that it
shall be considerably curtailed and placed among the vanishing evils,
with a view to its final extinction.

CHAPTER X.

WHAT ANAESTHETICS AND ANTISEPTICS HAVE MADE POSSIBLE.

_Education of defectives in prudence and self-restraint of little
avail.--Surgical suggestions discussed._

For the intelligent mind, which I assume has already been impressed with
the importance of such an inquiry, I think I have set forth the salient
truths with sufficient clearness, but holding that a recitation of
social faults, without a suggestion as to social reforms, is not only
useless but mischievous, I shall endeavour to show not only that the
situation is not hopeless, but that science and experience have, or will
reveal means to the accomplishment of