home instead of wandering abroad. These well-to-do young travellers often
marry the finest of our women, and later in life damage or sterilise them
through latent or chronic venereal disease. Hence many one-child
marriages--due not to the use of contraceptives, but to the action of the
gonococcus transferred to the body of the wife.

But there is this hope. It is among the mentally alert and well-informed
men and women that birth-control is first understood and applied, and it
is among this very same class that the medical prevention of venereal
disease is also first understood and applied. Thus, there will tend to be
less disease among this class than among the mentally torpid and
ill-informed masses of the community. This in itself will not _improve_
the race, but it will prevent the deterioration of certain classes and
increase their numbers. Nevertheless, so long as the irresponsible and
feeble-minded and diseased are permitted to multiply indiscriminately, as
at present, they must ultimately outnumber and overwhelm the classes which
are practising self-restraint or applying birth-control. This process may
even be hastened by a political enfranchisement, which enables twelve
feeble-minded persons to outvote two wise men six times over. Thus, to
succeed democracy must raise and maintain the general average of brains
and character throughout the community. In so far as it permits low-grade
individuals to be born in the homes of the masses, and high-grade
individuals in the homes of the classes, it is manufacturing a rod to
thrash its own back, successful rebellion against which mode of Government
ends in mere anarchy and chaos.[D]

[Footnote D: The present need of the white race is to increase its numbers
of fit and decrease its numbers of unfit. Over-population (except in a few
patches of the Old World) is not likely to be a problem for the white race
for centuries. They have several continents practically empty and