FUTURE OF THE RACE.

Taranaki Daily News, 11 March 1921, Page 7

FUTURE OF THE RACE.

THE OUTLOOK FOR BRITAIN. “BLACK AS IT CAN BE.’ Eugenists believed that, unless civilisation was guided on scientific principles, it must come to disaster, said Dr. Inge, the dean of St. Paul’s, in a lecture before the Eugenics Education Society. Either rational selection must take the place of the natural selection which the modern State would not allow to act, or we must go on deteriorating. The prospect for the immediate future was as black as it could be. We were breeding from our worst stocks, and our best was being squeezed out of existence. The key to the whole situation, in his opinion, was the historical law that whenever one class imposed taxes and another class paid them, the result was reckless extravagance and foolish waste, leading to national bankruptcy and general ruin. “With the disappearance of the tax; paying class, the mass, "who are in power, will have to tax themselves,” Dr. Inge continued. “The*country will be very poor and to a large extent barbarised, but sentimentalism, the great enemy of science and eugenics, will be at a discount. Wastefulness will come to an end because there will be nothing left to waste. v 1 see. a possibility for eugenics in the otherwise dismal prospect before us, because when the working man has to pay for the education of" his neighbor’s children, to support feeble-minded schools, hospitals for incurables, etc., he will be likely to realise that it is to his interest to apply the sacred trade union principle of limitation of output to his neighbor’s procreative activities, especially if the output were of a thoroughly bad quality. I do not see a crumb of comfort for my own class, and I am afraid that many of our best families will inevitably disappear ' from the face of the earth. It is c l the duty of the well-born, in the Galtonian sense, not to cut off their own families, however dreary the outlook for their children may be. The temptation to do so will be severe, and I have no doubt that in the profession classes especially we shall have thousands of childless and servantless households m which the tradition of culture and refined living will be maintained at the heavy price of family suicide. I cannot blame those, who think that this sacrifice has been forced upon them, hut as a eugenist J plead for the preservation of those stocks to which the country has owed the greater part of its glory. It is just here that eugenics may find in religion a potent ally.