The researches of Fahlbeck upon the Swedish nobility, which show the rapid extinction of the upper classes who practise _Economic Eugenics_, is a further proof of the absence of any link between economic superiority and psycho-physical superiority; since if the wealthier people, who usually intermarry, were really the better endowed, their descendants would never show those phenomena of extinction which betray a leaven of inner degeneration.
I conclude that Economic Eugenics is already practised to-day upon a large scale, and hence it is already possible to form an accurate judgment upon its results--which are those of return to the mean--degeneration and extinction of race. Now, these same results show that the economically superior classes are not at all the best endowed, and often even degenerate, and that, therefore, the only method calculated to effect a conjugal selection which would be socially useful is not to unite in marriage the richer people, but individuals really possessing superior qualities, and to exclude from marriage those who do not possess them.
THE CAUSE OF THE INFERIORITY OF PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHARACTERS IN THE LOWER SOCIAL CLASSES.
The author has compared the physical, demographic, and mental characters of the upper and leisured classes with the same characters in individuals of the inferior and poor classes. He has made use of several methods: (1) A comparison between the well-to-do and the poor children in schools; (2) a comparison between individuals belonging to different professions; (3) a comparison between the rich and the poor quarters of the same city.
He has also studied 4,000 children of the schools of Lausanne; Italian peasants; conscripts of different countries, classified according to their occupation; and the rich and the poor quarters of Lausanne, Paris, etc.
He has found that individuals of the lower classes show a smaller development of stature, of cranial capacity, of sensibility, of resistance to mental fatigue, a delay in the period when puberty makes its appearance, a slackening in growth, a very large number of anomalies, etc.
The causes of these differences ascertained in comparing the two groups are of the _mesological_ and _individual order_.