3210

No. who died in
first 5 years 12 29 115 171 200 254 105 1 887

Per cent. who
died 52.2 32.2 31.3 31.4 27.6 25.8 23.6 3.0 27.6

Allowing for the smallness of some of the groups, it is evident that
the amount of correlation is about the same here as among the English
Quakers of the Beeton-Pearson investigation, whose mortality was shown
in the two preceding tables. In the healthiest group from the royal
families--the cases in which the father lived to old age--the amount of
child mortality is about the same as that of the Hyde family in America,
which Alexander Graham Bell has studied--namely, somewhere around 250
per 1,000. One may infer that the royal families are rather below par in
soundness of constitution.[193]

All these studies agree perfectly in showing that the amount of child
mortality is determined primarily by the physical constitution of the
parents, as measured by their longevity. In the light of these facts,
the nature of the extraordinarily low child mortality shown in the 340
families from the Genealogical Record Office, with which we began the
study of this point, can hardly be misunderstood. These families have
the best inherited constitution possible and the other studies cited
would make us certain of finding a low child mortality among them, even
if we had not directly investigated the facts.

If the interpretation which we have given is correct, the conclusion is
inevitable that child mortality is primarily a problem of eugenics, and
that all other factors are secondary. There is found to be no warrant
for the statement so often repeated in one form or another, that "the
fundamental cause of the excessive rate of infant mortality in
industrial communities is poverty, inadequate incomes, and low standards
of living."[194] Royalty and its princely relatives are not
characterized by a low standard of living, and yet the child mortality
among them is very high--somewhere around 400 per 1,000, in cases where
a parent died young. If poverty is responsible in the one case, it must
be in the other--which is absurd. Or else the logical absurdity is
involved of inventing one cause to explain an effect to-day and a wholly
different cause to explain the same effect to-morrow. This is
unjustifiable in any case, and it is particularly so when the single
cause that explains both cases is so evident. If weak heredity causes
high mortality in t