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.