6.  Prisons, year ended 31st March, 1903 32,070

7.  Criminal Courts (Criminal Prosecutions),
    year ended 31st March, 1903 16,813

8.  Old Age Pensions (pensions only for
    persons over 65 years of age, who
    have been 25 years in the Colony,
    and who make a declaration of
    poverty, including departmental
    expenses) 212,962

A total of L705,756.  This constitutes the burden due to defectives and defects in others, a handful of workers have to bear in a sparse population of 800,000 souls in one of the finest countries on which the sun of heaven ever shone.

The burden which the fit have to bear has often been referred to by Dr. MacGregor, who states in one of his reports, “Wives and husbands, parents of bastards, all alike are encouraged by lavish charity (falsely so called) to entirely shirk their responsibilities in the well grounded assurance that public money will be forth-coming to keep them and their families in quite as comfortable position as their hardworking and independent neighbours.”

The state can not decree that men shall marry, or that women shall marry, or that women shall procreate.  All it can do is to discover why its subjects are not fertile, and remove the causes so far as it is possible.

As people become educated they become conscious of their limitations, and endeavour to break through them and better their conditions.

The more difficult this process is, the less likely will men and women be to incur the burden of a large family.  The more the conditions of existence are improved, the more completely is each man’s wish realized, and the more readily will he undertake the responsibilities of a family.

If the State can and will lighten the burden of taxation and modify the strain and stress of life, it will indirectly encourage procreation.

No direct encouragement is possible.  It was tried and it failed in Sparta, it was tried by Augustus and it failed in Rome, it must fail everywhere, for the most willing and the most ready to respond to any provision made to encourage increase, are the unfit, and it is the fertility of the unfit that is the very evil that has to be attacked.

It is the fertility of the unfit that makes the burden of the fit, and a tax on bachelors, or a bonus on families, would be responded to by the least fit, long before it affected those whose response was anticipated, and the problem sought to be solved would only be aggravated thereby.

No encouragement whatever can the State afford to give to the natural increase of population till it has successfully grappled with the propagation of defectives.

The burden of life would be lessened by nearly one-third if the fertility of defectives could be stopped.

The State would have to support only those who acquired defects, the scars of service more honourable than wealth, in their efforts to support themselves and families, and these would be few indeed, if inherited tendencies could be eliminated or reduced to a minimum.