The small family system, is it injurious or immoral? : with thirteen diagrams of population movements, etc., at home and abroad / by C.V. Drysdale ; and prefatory notes by B. Dunlop and William J. Robinson.

  • Drysdale, C. V. (Charles Vickery), 1874-1961.
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The small family system, is it injurious or immoral? : with thirteen diagrams of population movements, etc., at home and abroad / by C.V. Drysdale ; and prefatory notes by B. Dunlop and William J. Robinson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    22 The Small Family System many men and women feel that they can best develop their capabilities by remaining unmarried, and many mar¬ ried couples esteem it a duty alike to themselves and to unborn possible progeny to limit their families to a num¬ ber w^hich they feel able to educate and place out in life in thoroughly satisfactory fashion. It would indeed be somevv^hat paradoxical if in an age when the need for endowment, life, sickness, and other insurances is constantly being put before the public, doctrines such as 'Take no thought for the morrow, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink,' and * Happy is the man who hath his quiver full ' were felt to have their original force.*' It is quite possible that these new scruples and such part of the fall in the birth-rate as results from their exercise is an inevitable incident in the evolution of civi¬ lized humanity, and is the answer which Nature makes when it finds modern man departing so essentially in respect of environment and mode of life from those for which she first designed his ancestors. It does not follow, however, that medical men have nothing to do with the subject. If a distinction is drawn, as it should be, between conception-rates and birth-rates, this becomes more obvious. With the former it is no concern of medical men to interfere} but the latter they can influence materially in respect of height, and benefi¬ cially in point of effectiveness. . . . The effectiveness of the birth-rate can also be influenced by continuing the study of heredity, which has already been in progress so long, and by pressing on the notice of the public such facts as have been definitely ascertained. They may be few, but they offer the strongest ground for holding that a check should be placed on the fertility of certain classes of individuals whose offspring, if not defective from the 1 Italics mine.— C. V. D.