maternity. Now, as the findings of Tredgold and Karl Pearson and the
British Eugenists so conclusively show, and as the infant mortality
reports so thoroughly substantiate, a high rate of fecundity is always
associated with the direst poverty, irresponsibility, mental defect,
feeble-mindedness, and other transmissible taints. The effect of
maternity endowments and maternity centers supported by private
philanthropy would have, perhaps already have had, exactly the most
dysgenic tendency. The new government program would facilitate the
function of maternity among the very classes in which the absolute
necessity is to discourage it.

Such "benevolence" is not merely superficial and near-sighted. It
conceals a stupid cruelty, because it is not courageous enough to face
unpleasant facts. Aside from the question of the unfitness of many women
to become mothers, aside from the very definite deterioration in the
human stock that such programs would inevitably hasten, we may question
its value even to the normal though unfortunate mother. For it is never
the intention of such philanthropy to give the poor over-burdened and
often undernourished mother of the slum the opportunity to make the
choice herself, to decide whether she wishes time after to time to bring
children into the world. It merely says "Increase and multiply: We are
prepared to help you do this." Whereas the great majority of mothers
realize the grave responsibility they face in keeping alive and rearing
the children they have already brought into the world, the maternity
center would teach them how to have more. The poor woman is taught how
to have her seventh child, when what she wants to know is how to avoid
bringing into the world her eighth.

Such philanthropy, as Dean Inge has so unanswerably pointed out, is kind
only to be cruel, and unwittingly promotes precisely the results most