It is now well recognized that large families are associated with degeneracy, and, in the widest sense, with abnormality of every kind.  Thus, it is undoubtedly true that men of genius tend to belong to very large families, though it may be pointed out to those who fear an alarming decrease of genius from the tendency to the limitation of the family, that the position in the family most often occupied by the child of genius is the firstborn. (See Havelock Ellis, A Study of British Genius, pp. 115-120).  The insane, the idiotic, imbecile, and weak-minded, the criminal, the epileptic, the hysterical, the neurasthenic, the tubercular, all, it would appear, tend to belong to large families (see e.g., Havelock Ellis, op. cit., p. 110; Toulouse, Les Causes de la Folie, p. 91; Harriet Alexander, “Malthusianism and Degeneracy,” Alienist and Neurologist, Jan., 1901).  It has, indeed, been shown by Heron, Pearson, and Goring, that not only the eldest-born, but also the second-born, are specially liable to suffer from pathological defect (insanity, criminality, tuberculosis).  There is, however, it would seem, a fallacy in the common interpretation of this fact.  According to Van den Velden (as quoted in Sexual-Probleme, May, 1909, p. 381), this tendency is fully counterbalanced by the rising mortality of children from the firstborn onward.  The greater pathological tendency of the earlier children is thus simply the result of a less stringent selection by death.  So far as they show any really greater pathological tendency, apart from this fallacy, it is perhaps due to premature marriage.  There is another fallacy in the frequent statement that the children in small families are more feeble than those in large families.  We have to distinguish between a naturally small family, and an artificially small family.  A family which is small merely as the result of the feeble procreative energy of the parents, is likely to be a feeble family; a family which is small as the result of the deliberate control of the parents, shows, of course, no such tendency.

These considerations, it will be seen, do not modify the tendency of the large family to be degenerate.  We may connect this phenomenon with the disposition, often shown by nervously unsound and abnormal persons, to believe that they have a special aptitude to procreate fine children.  “I believe that everyone has a special vocation,” said a man to Marro (La Puberta, p. 459); “I find that it is my vocation to beget superior children.”  He begat four,—­an epileptic, a lunatic, a dipsomaniac, and a valetudinarian,—­and himself died insane.  Most people have come across somewhat similar, though perhaps less marked, cases of this delusion.  In a matter of such fateful gravity to other human beings, no one can safely rely on his own unsupported impressions.

The demand of national efficiency thus corresponds with the demand of developing humanitarianism, which,