me of those who are doomed by heredity to a selective death, but
are kept alive through the first year, die in the second or third or
fourth year. They must die sooner or later; they have not inherited
sufficient resistance to survive more than a limited time. If they are
by a great effort carried through the first year, it is only to die in
the next. This is a statement which we have nowhere observed in the
propaganda of the infant mortality movement; and it is perhaps a
disconcerting one. It can only be proved by refined statistical methods,
but several independent determinations by the English biometricians
leave no doubt as to the fact. This work of Karl Pearson, E. C. Snow, and
Ethel M. Elderton, was cited in our chapter on natural selection; the
reader will recall how they showed that nature is weeding out the
weaklings, and in proportion to the stringency with which she weeds them
out at the start, there are fewer weaklings left to die in succeeding
years.

To put the facts in the form of a truism, part of the children born in
any district in a given year are doomed by heredity to an early death;
and if they die in one year they will not be alive to die in the
succeeding year, and vice versa. Of course there are in addition infant
deaths which are not selective and which if prevented would leave the
infant with as good a chance as any to live.

In the light of these researches, we are forced to conclude that
baby-saving campaigns accomplish less than is thought; that the supposed
gain is to some extent temporary and illusory.

2. There is still another consequence. If the gain is by great exertions
made more than temporary; if the baby who would otherwise have died in
the first months is brought to adult life and reproduction, it means in
many cases the dissemination of another strain of weak heredity, which
natural selection would have cut off ruthlessly in the interests of race
betterment. In so far, then, as the infant mortality movement is not
futile it is, from a strict biological viewpoint, often detrimental to
the future of the race.

Do we then discourage all attempts to save the babies? Do we leave them
all to natural selection? Do we adopt the "better dead" gospel?

Unqualifiedly, no! The sacrifice of the finer human feelings, which
would accompany any such course, would be a greater loss to the race
than is the eugenic loss from the perpetuation of weak strains of
heredity. The abolition of altrui