, the pauper, the insane
and the criminal. These either will not, or cannot support themselves
adequately and legitimately. For their treatment support and correction,
hospitals, asylums, charitable aid boards, gaols and other institutions
have had to be established, and the upkeep of these has become a great
burden which necessarily has to be borne by the healthy, moral and
industrious section of the community.

Dr Chapple draws attention to the undeniable fact that there is a
tendency on the part of those unfit to increase at a greater ratio than
the fit. The rate of increase during the past twenty years has been so
great and so disproportionate as to make the cost of their maintenance
become an increasingly heavier one for the individual taxpayer to bear,
and to cause for this and other reasons, a considerable amount of alarm
in the minds of those who have the welfare of society at heart.

The Doctor believes that the cause of this proportionate rate of
increase is to be found in the methods adopted largely among certain
classes for the prevention of child-birth.

In the conclusion of his book he states that sexual inhibition on the
part of the better classes accounts for their smaller rate of increase
as compared with the rate of the inferior classes. We cannot accept this
conclusion without more evidence. We want to know definitely whether the
natural rate of increase among the better classes is really lower than
that existing among the inferior classes. That is to say, are the ranks
of the defective being swelled by the influence of heredity or by some
extensive force recruiting from among the ranks of the fit? Another
question is this: Since the use of preventives is available to both
sections alike, the Doctor accounts for the supposed natural
disproportion by assuming that the better classes restrain themselves.
Is he right? Using the word "restrain" in its absolute sense we beg
leave for most emphatic doubt. In an enquiry such as this is, the only
factor of any real importance as accounting for a diminished birth-rate,
is the use of preventives. If this method is confined to the better
classes, we must refuse to call them any longer our "best stock," for,
if they are not producing a defective offspring, they are, as the recent
Australian Birth-Rate Commission has made abundantly plain, speedily
making defectives of themselves, besides being guilty of lowering the
social moral tone and hardening its sensibili