Number of Female Descendants who themselves become Mothers. ====================================================================== After Number | A | B | of Years | Of 100 Mothers whose | Of 100 Mothers whose | as below. | Marriages and those of | Marriages and those of | | their Daughters all take | their Daughters take | | place at the Age of | place at the Age of | | 20 Years. | 29 Years. | | --- | ---- | | (Ratio of Increase in | (Ratio of Decrease in | | each successive | each successive Generation | | Generation being 1.15.) | being 0.85.) | -------------+--------------------------+----------------------------| 108 | 175 | 61 | 216 | 299 | 38 | 324 | 535 | 23 | ======================================================================
The general result is that the group B gradually disappears, and the group A more than supplants it. Hence if the races best fitted to occupy the land are encouraged to marry early, they will breed down the others in a very few generations.
It may seem very reasonable to ask how the result proposed in the last paragraph is to be attained, and to add that the difficulty of carrying so laudable a proposal into effect lies wholly in the details, and therefore that until some working plan is suggested, the consideration of improving the human race is Utopian. But this requirement is not altogether fair, because if a persuasion of the importance of any end takes possession of men's minds, sooner or later means are found by which that end is carried into effect. Some of the objections offered at first will be discovered to be sentimental, and of no real importance--the sentiment will change and they will disappear; others that are genuine are not met, but are in some way turned or eluded; and lastly, through the ingenuity of many minds directed for a long time towards the achievement of a common purpose, many happy ideas are sure to be hit upon that would not have occurred to a single individual.
This being premised, it will suffice to faintly sketch out some sort of basis for eugenics, it being now an understanding that we are provisionally agreed, for the sake of argument, that the improvement of race is an object of first-class importance, and that the popular feeling has been educated to regard it in that light.