means that each woman who demonstrates ability to bear offspring must bear 3.7 children. This it must be noted, is a minimum number, for no account has been taken of those who, through some defect or disease developed late in life, become unmarriageable. In general, unless every married woman brings three children to maturity, the race will not even hold its own in numbers. And this means that each woman must bear four children, since not all the children born will live. If the married women of the country bear fewer than nearly four children each, the race is in danger of losing ground.
Such a statement ought to strike the reader as one of grave importance; but we labor under no delusion that it will do so. For we are painfully aware that the bugaboo of the declining birth-rate of superior people has been raised so often in late years, that it has become stale by repetition. It no longer causes any alarm. The country is filled with sincere but mentally short-sighted individuals, who are constantly ready to vociferate that numbers are no very desirable thing in a birth-rate; that quality is wanted, not quantity; that a few children given ideal care are of much more value to the state and the race than are many children, who can not receive this attention.
And this attitude toward the subject, we venture to assert, is a graver peril to the race than is the declining birth-rate itself. For there is enough truth in it to make it plausible, and to separate the truth from the dangerous untruth it contains, and to make the bulk of the population see the distinction, is a task which will tax every energy of the eugenist.
Unfortunately, this is not a case of mere difference of opinion