ings can be bettered, disease
diminished, and the death-rate lowered. How much may thus be
accomplished we realize when we compare the admirably precise and
balanced pages in which Charles Booth, in the concluding volumes of his
great work, has summarized his survey of London, with the picture
presented by Chadwick and Gavin half a century earlier. Ugly and painful
as are many of the features of this modern London, the vision which is,
on the whole, evoked is that of a community which has attained
self-consciousness, which is growing into some faint degree of harmony
with its environment, and is seeking to gain the full amount of the
satisfaction which an organized urban life can yield. Booth, who
appears to have realized the significance of a decreased fertility in
the attainment of this progress, hopes for a still greater fall in the
birth-rate; and those who seek to restore the birth-rate of half a
century ago are engaged on a task which would be criminal if it were not
based on ignorance, and which is, in any case, fatuous.

The whole course of zoological evolution reveals a constantly
diminishing reproductive activity and a constantly increasing
expenditure of care on the offspring thus diminished in number.[141] Fish
spawn their ova by the million, and it is a happy chance if they become
fertilized, a highly unlikely chance that more than a very small
proportion will ever attain maturity. Among the mammals, however, the
female may produce but half a dozen or fewer offspring at a time, but
she lavishes so much care upon them that they have a very fair chance
of all reaching maturity. In man, in so far as he refrains from
returning to the beast and is true to the impulse which in him becomes a
conscious process of civilization, the same movement is carried forward.
He even seeks to decrease still further the number of his offspring by
voluntary effort, and at the same time to increase their quality and
magnify their importance.[142]

When in human families, especially under civilized conditions, we see
large families we are in the presence of a reversion to the tendencies
that prevail among lower organisms. Such large families may probably be
regarded, as Naecke suggests, as constituting a symptom of degeneration.
It is noteworthy that they usually occur in the pathological and
abnormal classes, among the insane, the feeble-minded, the criminal, the
consumptive, the alcoholic, etc.[143]

This tendency of the birt