oduced.
Such a step, of course, must be taken on the individual responsibility
of a doctor, nurse or other social worker. A propaganda has arisen
during recent years, in the United States, for the repeal of all laws
which prohibit giving knowledge about and selling contraceptives.
Whether or not it succeeds in changing the law it will, like the
Bradlaugh-Besant episode, spread contraception widely. This propaganda
is based largely on social and economic grounds, and is sometimes
unscientific in its methods and avowed aims. But whatever its nature may
be, there seems little reason (judging from analogy in European
countries) to believe that it can be stopped.

The "infant mortality movement" also has an effect here which is rarely
recognized. It is a stock argument of birth control propagandists that a
high birth-rate means a high rate of infant mortality; but A. O. Powys
has demonstrated that cause and effect are to some extent reversed in
this statement, and that it is equally true that a high rate of infant
mortality means a high birth-rate, in a section of the population where
birth control is not practiced. The explanation is the familiar fact
that conception takes place less often in nursing mothers. But if a
child dies early or is bottle-fed, a new conception is likely to occur
much sooner than would otherwise be the case. By reducing infant
mortality and teaching mothers to feed their babies naturally, the
infant mortality movement is thereby reducing the birth-rate in the
poorer part of the population, a eugenic service which to some extent
offsets the dysgenic results that, as we shall show in the last chapter,
follow the "Save the Babies" propaganda.

With the spread of the birth control and infant mortality movements one
may therefore look forward to some diminution of the differential
element in the birth-rate, together with a further decline in that
birth-rate as a whole.

Such a situation, which seems to us almost a certainty within the next
decade or two, will not change the duty of eugenics, on which we have
been insisting in this chapter and, to a large extent, throughout the
present book. It will be just as necessary as ever that the families
which are, and have been in the past, of the greatest benefit and value
to the country, have a higher birth-rate. The greatest task of eugenics,
as we see it, will still be to find means by which the birth-rate among
such families can be increased. This increas