Our social conditions manufacture defectives, and foster their fertility.  The strain and stress of modern competition excite an anxiety and nervous tension under which many break down, and much of the insanity that exists to-day is attributable to nervous strain in the struggle of life.

The strong attractive force of one social stratum upon the next below, excites in the latter a nervous tension which predisposes to a breakdown in the face of some adversity.

The passion for ease and luxury, and the dread of poverty tend to overstrain the nervous system, and numberless neurotic defectives fall back upon society, and give themselves up to the propagation of their kind.

Our charitable aid institutions tend largely to swell the numbers of the great unfit.

Dr. MacGregor in one of his valuable and forcible reports upon our charitable aid institutions, says:—­

“Our lavish and indiscriminate outdoor relief, whose evils I am tired of recapitulating,—­our shameless abuse of the hospital system,—­the crowding of our asylums by people in their dotage, kept there because there is no suitable place to send them to, and many of them sent by friends anxious only to be relieved of the duty of supporting and caring for them,—­what is it all coming to?"...

“The practical outcome of our overlooking the continued accumulation of degenerates among our people by our fostering of all kinds of weakness will necessarily be, if it continues, that society will itself degenerate.  Taxation will increase by leaps and bounds, and the industrious and self-respecting citizens will rebel, especially if taxation is expected to meet all the demands of a legislature that puts our humanitarian idea of justice in the place of charity.”

It has already been urged that there is no evidence of any physiological defect in any class of society interfering with fertility.  Sexual inhibition, from prudential motives is the real cause in New Zealand.

Sexual inhibition implies well-developed self-control, the very force in which almost all defectives are most deficient, and the absence of which makes them criminals, drunkards and paupers.  In almost all defectives too, prudence is conspicuous by its absence.

The only moral force we know of, that has curtailed, or will curtail, the family within the limits of comfortable subsistence, is sexual inhibition with prudence.  But this force is absolutely impossible amongst defectives.

It is not only a powerful force among the normal, but with us to-day it is powerfully operative.  Amongst the defectives it does not and cannot exist.

Apart from observation and statistics, therefore, it can be shown that the birth-rate amongst the unfit is undisturbed.  They marry and are given in marriage, free from all restraint save that of environment, and worst of all they propagate their kind.