Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    427/534 (page 411)
    ECONOMIC FACTOR IN EUGENICS 411 information in the United States is logically traceable to the fact that the country is still underpeopled and that the capitalist interests require a considerable increase of producers and consumers. The industrial capi¬ talist wants an abundant supply of labor, and the landlord wants a dense population that will raise land values. It is said that a representative of New York landed interests appeared before the legislature and argued against birth control on the score that every child born in New York City added a thousand dollars to land values. The economically endowed classes have, of course complete command of the means of prevention, but these must be withheld from the proletariat. The age at which parents will have their children is controlled largely by economic conditions. In a pioneer society of crude plenty, where even the young child can be of use, children commence to come before the parents have attained maturity. The same thing is true of those stages of industrial development that exploit child-labor, and that put the period of greatest parental earning power in the early twenties. As the population gets farther away from the soil, as the bearing, feeding, and education of children becomes an expense, the age of parenthood tends to be postponed, and the quahty of the race is influenced thereby, both by the difference made by the greater age of parenthood and by the fact that not all elements of society are equally affected by the tendency. It is important also to know what proportion of children grow to ma¬ turity, for juvenile mortality is almost equivalent to race suicide. The death rate of children in different countries and classes is pretty directly a function of economic well-being. The average duration of life as between classes is also to be considered, as affecting the opportunity for parenthood. The greater length of life of certain economically sheltered classes compen¬ sates to some extent for their lower birth-rate, and tends partially to counteract the lateness of their marriage. There is not room within the limits of this paper to follow out all the suggestions as to the ramifications of the economic factor throughout the field of eugenics. If it seems that economics has been overemphasized, I am willing to concede that the seeming weight of the considerations I have set forth may, perhaps, be considerably neutralized by the possibility that many or most of the traits which come within the sphere of the economic selection herein described may not be matters of heredity at all, but may be transmitted by social contact; or at any rate, that the distribution of characteristic traits bears little or no relation to the national, or racial, or class lines of human society. I have never seen convincing scientific evidence that the differences between races, nations, social classes in the