EUGENICS.

King Country Chronicle, Volume V, Issue 334, 4 February 1911, Page 4

EUGENICS.

The Hon. Dr Findlay is a thinker ; and a speaker whose utterances always ; deserve attention and command respect, and his lecture to the Dunedin Eugenic Society last week is no exi ception to the rule. Eugenics means : the science of producing happy and healthy human beings. Dr Findlay , pointed to the declining birth rate, ' now little ahead of the death rate, : but for the births amongst the unfit; to the tendency to drift towards ; city life amongst all civilised peoples, ; European or Australasian; and to the : fact that the birth rate was dwindling fastest in the cities. The birth 1 rate, on the other hand, amongst the mentally defective and feeble minded, in England and New Zealand, alike ranged from 6 to 7 per family, against a birth rate of 2 or 3 per : family amongst the superior classes. He quoted one astounding case of a family of defectives in New Zealand which would, in a few years, have ! cost the State £20,000 for maintenance in asylums, gaols and homes. What is the remedy for this truly I alarming condition of things? The law which allows marriages of chili dren as young as fourteen in the case of boys and twelve in that of girls ' must be altered, and the State must ' definitely interfere to require a health ■ certificate in many other cases where epilectics, imbeciles, consumptives ■ and lunatics are contemplating mat- : rimony. And above all, the State ! must make country life attractive, by the provision of better transit, accommodation, good roads, country ■ libraries, telephones and post offices. i The State must, as Dr Findlay says I "prudently urbanise the country." Close settlement on common sense lines wherever possible, combined with good metalled roads, would do much to reconcile the settler to his ,' lot, and to induce the agricultural labourer to stay on the fresh, green places of our land. Then we could look for a rise in the birth rate amongst the fit, and a peopling of the i land with the best types it is possible to secure. In the opening up of our locked-up lands lies the solution of the problem of eugenics. For it is only the country-bred that will, in turn, produce the types most needed and in the gradual increase of the farming classes lies our only hope of national salvation.