Chapter V: CAUSES OF DECLINING BIRTH-RATE p. 36

Influence of self-restraint without continence.--Desire to limit families in New Zealand not due to poverty.--Offspring cannot be limited without self-restraint.--New Zealand's economic condition.--High standard of general education.--Tendency to migrate within the colony.--Diffusion of ideas.--Free social migration between all classes.--Desire to migrate upwards.--Desire to raise the standard of ease and comfort.--Social status the measure of financial status.--Social attraction of one class to next below.--Each conscious of his limitation.--Large families confirm this limitation.--The cost of the family.--The cost of maternity.--The craving for ease and luxury. Parents' desire for their children's social success.--Humble homes bear distinguished sons.--Large number with University education in New Zealand.--No child labour except in hop and dairy districts.--Hopeless poverty a cause of high birth-rates.--High birth-rates a cause of poverty.--Fecundity depends on capacity of the female to bear children.

CHAPTER VI.--ETHICS OF PREVENTION p. 31

Fertility the law of life.--Man interprets and controls this law.--Marriage law necessary to fix paternal responsibility.--Malthus's high ideal.--If prudence the motive, continence and celibacy violate no law.--Post-nuptial intermittent restraint.--Ethics of prevention judged by consequences.--When procreation is a good and when an evil.--Oligantrophy.--Artificial checks are physiological sins.

CHAPTER VII.--WHO PREVENT p. 64

Desire for family limitation result of our social system.--Desire and practice not uniform through all classes.--The best limit, the worst do not.--Early marriages and large families.--N.Z. marriage rates.--Those who delay, and those who abstain from marriage.--Good motives mostly actuate.--All limitation implies restraint.--Birth-rates vary inversely with prudence and self-control.--The limited family usually born in early married life when progeny is less likely to be well developed.--Our worst citizens most prolific. Effect of poverty on fecundity.--Effect of alcoholic intemperance.--Effect of mental and physical defects.--Defectives propagate their kind.--The intermittent inhabitants of Asylums and Gaols constitute the greatest danger to society.--Character the resultant of two forces--motor impulse and inhibition.--Chief criminal characteristic is defective inhibition.--This defect is strongly hereditary.--It expresses itself in unrestrained fertility.

CHAPTER VIII.--THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE FIT IN RELATION TO STATE p. 77

The State's ideal in relation to the fertility of its subjects.--Keen competition means great effort and great waste of life.--If in the minds of the citizens space and food are ample multiplication works automatically.--To New Zealanders food now includes the luxuries as well as the necessities of life.--Men are driven to the alternative of supporting a family of their own or a degenerate family of defectives.--The State enforces the one but cannot enforce the other.--New Zealand taxation.--The burden of the bread-winner.--As the State lightens this burden it encourages fertility.--The survival of the unfit makes the burden of the fit.

CHAPTER IX.--THE MULTIPLICATION OF THE UNFIT IN RELATION TO THE STATE p. 85

Ancient methods of preventing the fertility of the unfit.--Christian sentiment suppressed inhuman practices.--Christian care brings many defectives to the child-bearing period of life.--The association of mental and physical defects.--Who are the unfit?--The tendency of relatives to cast their degenerate kinsfolk on the State.--Our social conditions manufacture defectives and foster their fertility.--The only moral force that limits families is inhibition with prudence.--Defective self-control transmitted hereditarily.--Dr. MacGregor's cases.--The transmission of insanity.--Celibacy of the insane is the prophylaxis of insanity in the race.--The environment of the unfit.--Defectives snatched from Nature's clutches.--At the age of maturity they are left to propogate their kind.

CHAPTER X.--WHAT ANÆSETICS AND ANTISEPTICS HAVE MADE POSSIBLE p. 99

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

CHAPTER XI.--TUBO-LIGATURE p. 110

The fertility of the criminal a greater danger to society than his depredations.--Artificial sterility of women.--The menopause artificially induced. Untoward results.--The physiology of the Fallopian tubes.--Their ligature procures permanent sterility.--No other results immediate or remote.--Some instances due to disease.--Defective women and the wives of defective men would welcome protection from unhealthy offspring.

CHAPTER XII.--SUGGESTIONS AS TO APPLICATION p. 118

The State's humanitarian zeal protects the lives and fosters the fertility of the degenerate.--A confirmed or hereditary criminal defined.--Law on the subject of sterilization could at first be permissive.--It should apply, to begin with, to criminals and the insane.--Marriage certificates of health should be required.--Women's readiness to submit to surgical treatment for minor as well as major pelvic diseases.--Surgically induced sterility of healthy women a greater crime than abortion.--This danger not remote.

CONCLUSION p. 124

THE FERTILITY OF THE UNFIT.

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