responsible--and possibly more selfish--sections of the community. The
appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for the benefit
of the nation or the race, or any other abstraction, will fall on deaf
ears.

Pearson has done invaluable work in pointing out the fallacies and the
false conclusions of the ordinary statisticians. But when he attempts to
show by the methods of biometrics that not only the first child but
also the second, are especially liable to suffer from transmissible
pathological defects, such as insanity, criminality and tuberculosis,
he fails to recognize that this tendency is counterbalanced by the high
mortality rate among later children. If first and second children reveal
a greater percentage of heritable defect, it is because the later born
children are less liable to survive the conditions produced by a large
family.

In passing, we should here recognize the difficulties presented by the
idea of "fit" and "unfit." Who is to decide this question? The grosser,
the more obvious, the undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only
be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind. But among the
writings of the representative Eugenists one cannot ignore the distinct
middle-class bias that prevails. As that penetrating critic, F. W.
Stella Browne, has said in another connection, "The Eugenics Education
Society has among its numbers many most open-minded and truly
progressive individuals but the official policy it has pursued for years
has been inspired by class-bias and sex bias. The society laments with
increasing vehemence the multiplication of the less fortunate classes at
a more rapid rate than the possessors of leisure and opportunity. (I do
not think it relevant here to discuss whether the innate superiority of
endowment in the governing class really is so overwhelming as to justify