A discriminating regard to the quality of offspring will act beneficially on the side of positive eugenics by substituting the pernicious tendency to put a premium on excess of childbirth by the more rational method of putting a premium on the quality of the child.  It has been one of the most unfortunate results of the mania for protesting against that decline of the birthrate which is always and everywhere the result of civilization, that there has been a tendency to offer special social or pecuniary advantages to the parents of large families.  Since large families tend to be degenerate, and to become a tax on the community, since rapid pregnancies in succession are not only a serious drain on the strength of the mother but are now known to depreciate seriously the quality of the offspring, and since, moreover, it is in large families that disease and mortality chiefly prevail, all the interests of the community are against the placing of any premium on large families, even in the case of parents of good stock.  The interests of the State are bound up not with the quantity but with the quality of its citizens, and the premium should be placed not on the families that reach a certain size but on the individual children that reach a certain standard; the attainment of this standard could well be based on observations made from birth to the fifth year.  A premium on this basis would be as beneficial to a State as that on the merely numerical basis is pernicious.

This consideration applies with still greater force to the proposals for the “systematic endowment of motherhood” of which we hear more and more.  So moderate and judicious a social reformer as Mr. Sidney Webb writes:  “We shall have to face the problem of the systematic endowment of motherhood, and place this most indispensable of all professions upon an honorable economic basis.  At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated, and in no way honored by the State."[459] True as this statement is, it must always be remembered that an indispensable preliminary to any proposal for the endowment of motherhood by the State is a clear conception of the kind of motherhood which the State requires.  To endow the reckless and indiscriminate motherhood which we see around us, to encourage, that is, by State aid, the production of citizens a large proportion of whom the State, if it dared, would like to destroy as unfit, is too ridiculous a proposal to deserve discussion.[460] The only sound reason, indeed, for the endowment of motherhood is that it would enable the State, in its own interests, to further the natural selection of the fit.

As to the positive qualities which the State is entitled to endow in its encouragement of motherhood, it is still too early to speak with complete assurance.  Negative eugenics tends to be ahead of positive eugenics; it is easier to detect bad stocks than to be quite sure of good stocks.  Both on the scientific side and on the social side, however, we are beginning to attain a clearer realization of the end to be attained and a more precise knowledge of the methods of attaining it.[461]