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In other words, each successive generation has less and less food to divide among more and more people, and, for inherited traditional and superstitious reasons, they refuse to adopt any rational program of birth-control and population-limitation. "But, fortunately, they now have the atomic bomb, and they are developing radioactive poisons, weapons of mass-effect.
New Zealand, which is also one of the typical birth-control countries, had a birth rate of 25.3 and an infant death rate of only 9.1 for the same year. These figures are in marked and happy contrast with those for the birth registration of the United States, where the reports for 1916 show a birth rate of 24.8, but an infant death rate of 14.7.
But this question has, nevertheless, a genuinely serious aspect, and I should be sorry even to touch on the question of birth-control in relation to "Race-Suicide" without making that serious aspect clear. "Race-Suicide," we know, has no existence.
We must at least admit that voluntary birth-control is an important contributory cause, in some sense indeed, of supreme importance, because it is within man's own power and because man is thus enabled to guide and mould processes of Nature which might otherwise work disastrously.
It is certainly impossible to over-rate the importance of the economic factor in society, or of a good environment. And it is true that eugenics alone, like birth-control alone, can effect little if the economic basis of society is unsound. But it is equally certain that the economic factor can never in itself suffice for fine living or even as a cure-all of social and racial diseases.
The observance of birth-control is thus a far more effective lever for raising the state of the social environment and improving the conditions of breeding, than is direct action on the part of the community in its collective capacity to attain the same end.
It is often said I have said it myself that birth-control when practised merely as a limitation of the family, scarcely suffices to further the eugenic progress of the race.
Thus there seems, on a wide survey of the matter, no reason whatever to quarrel with that conviction, which is gradually over-spreading all classes of human society in all parts of the world, and ever more widely leading to practical action, that the welfare of the individual, the family, the community, and the race is bound up with the purposive and deliberate practice of birth-control, whether we advocate that policy on the ground that we are thereby furthering Nature, or on the opposite, and no doubt equally excellent, ground that we are thereby correcting Nature.
It is not scientific research alone, nor even the wide popular diffusion of knowledge, that will suffice to bring eugenics and birth-control, singly or in their due combination, into the course of our daily lives. They need to be embodied in our instinctive impulses.
It is good to know that the first of the birth-control clinics of Holland followed shortly after a thorough and enthusiastic discussion of the subject at an international medical congress in Amsterdam in 1878. The Dutch Neo-Malthusian League was founded in 1881. The first birth-control clinic in the world was opened in 1885 by Dr. Aletta Jacobs in Amsterdam.
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