W. A. Chapple

“ In a highly developed man true happiness is impossible in the presence of pain and misery in others and vice versa; happiness is contagious and flows to us from the joy of others. If the happiness of others then is so essential to my own happiness, I am fulfilling the first law of life and ministering to my own preservation in health and happiness by using my best endeavours to promote this state in others. My material comfort too depends largely on the labour, and love, and the contribution of others in the complex industrial system and division of labour of the higher civilisations. ”

“ Fluctuations in production take place of course, but not such as to result in want, to any noticeable extent. There are no extremes of heat and cold, no extremes of drought and flood, no extremes of wealth and poverty. The climate is equable, the progress is uniform, the classes are at peace.
Every natural blessing that a people could desire in a country, is to be found in New Zealand. Climate, natural fertility, and production, unrivalled scenery in mountain, lake, and forest, everything to bless and prosper the present, and inspire hope in the future. ”

“ Those little tendons like silken threads, that run down those slender pink legs to each and every toe, and move its little joints so swiftly that we hardly see them—that little brain, no bigger than a tiny seed, in which is planted a mysterious force that impels it to set all those brand-new muscles in motion, and to dart after a fly with the swiftness of an arrow—all this wondrous mechanism, all this beauteous structure, all this perfection of function, all this adaptation to environment, have evolved from a few microscopic cells in three short weeks. ”

“ The procreation of the unfit must be faced and grappled with. And the greater the decline in the birth-rate of our best stock, the more urgent does the solution of the problem become. For is not the proportion of the unfit to the fit yearly increasing!
It has become the most pressing duty of the State, in face of the great change that has so rapidly come over our natural increase, to declare that the procreation of the unfit shall cease, or at least, that it shall be considerably curtailed and placed among the vanishing evils, with a view to its final extinction. ”

“ We talk, therefore, of the higher pleasures—the pleasures of knowledge and learning, of wider sympathies and love, of the contemplation of extended prosperity and concord, of hope for international fraternity and peace, and for a life beyond the grave. Happiness to the highly civilized will consist, therefore, of the surplus of these pleasures over the pains of their negation. ”

“ We are now face to face with the startling fact that this army of defectives is increasing in numbers and relative fertility.
Consider what a burden is the criminal. Every community is more or less terrorised by him; our property is liable to be plundered, our houses invaded, our women ravished, our children murdered. ”

“ The growth of the Criminal is one of the most ominous clouds on every national horizon. In spite of advances in criminology the rate of increase is so alarming that the "Unfit" threatens to be to the new Civilization what the Hun and Vandal were to the old. How to deal with this dangerous class is perhaps the most serious question that faces Sociologists at this hour. And something must be done speedily, else our civilization is in imminent peril of being swamped by the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the Criminal. ”

“ It has already been suggested, that the desire to limit families is due to a consciousness of responsibility on the part of prospective parents. They realise the stress of competition in the struggle for existence, they are anxious for their own pecuniary and social stability, and even more anxious that the children, for whose birth they are responsible, should be provided with the necessities and comforts of life which health and development require. They are eager, too, that their children should be equipped with a good education, and thus be given a fair advantage in the race of life. ”

“ The very qualities, therefore, that make the social unit a law-abiding and useful citizen, who could and should raise the best progeny for the State, also enable him to limit his family, or escape the responsibility of family life altogether; while, on the other hand, the very qualities which make a man a social burden, a criminal, a pauper, or a drunkard—improvidence and defective inhibition—ensure that his fertility will be unrestrained, except by the checks of biological law. ”

“ Not only my happiness and health but my very existence depends on the good-will and toil of others. Thus from a purely egoistic standpoint, my first duty to myself is to increase the happiness in others, and, therefore, my first duty to myself becomes my highest duty to society. ”

“ If the State has a right so to interpret and limit the law of reproduction, a principle in human affairs is established, and its decree that individuals shall not mate before a certain age, or not mate at all, is only a further application of the same principle. By the law of reproduction a strong instinct, second only in force and universality to the law of self-preservation, is planted in the sexes, and upon a blind obedience to this force, the continuity of the race depends. ”

“ There is a consensus of opinion among demographists that this decline is due to the voluntary curtailment of the family in married life. Prudence is the motive, and self-restraint the means by which this curtailment is made possible. But prudence and self-restraint are the characteristic attributes of the best citizens. They are conspicuous by their absence in the worst; and it is a matter of common observation that the hopelessly poor, the drunken and improvident, the criminal and the defective have the largest families, while those in the higher walks of life rejoice in smaller numbers. ”

“ He believed that moral restraint was the check of civilized man, and as civilization proceeded, this check would replace the others, and prevent absolutely the population pressing upon the limits of subsistence.
He saw in moral restraint only self-denial, constant continence, and entertained not a doubt, that the generative instinct would be cheated of its natural fruit. The passion for marriage is so strong (thought Malthus) that there is no fear for the race; it cannot be over-controlled.
The gratification of the sexual instinct, and procreation were the same thing in the mind of Malthus. ”

“ It is true of all plant and animal life; it is true of man as an individual; it is true of his mind as well as of his body; it is true of society as an aggregation of individuals. As men have evolved from a lower to a higher, a simple to a complex state, so they are still evolving and rising "on stepping stones of their dead selves to higher things." ”

“ It is possible to sterilize defective women, and the wives of defective men by an operation of simple ligature, which produces absolutely no change whatever in the subjects of it, beyond rendering this fertilization impossible, for the rest of life. This remedy for the great and growing evil which confronts us to-day is suggested, not to avenge but to protect society, and in profound pity for the classes who are a burden to themselves, as well as to those who have to tend and support them. ”

“ Perhaps to bear a child, that, for the need of the educative, elevating companionship of family mates is consumed by self, inheriting that vicious selfishness, which he by his birth defeated, and finding all the forces of nature focussed on his defect, like a pack of hounds that turn and rend an injured mate. ”

“ Biology is the science that observes all this, and enunciates the law that the life history of this animal cell, i.e., its history from a simple unicellular state in the egg, to its complex multicellular state in the matured chick, represents the history of the race to which the chick belongs. If we could trace that chicken back through all its ancestry, we would discover at different periods in the history of life upon the globe (about 100 million years, according to Haeckel) exactly the stages of development we found in the life history of the chick, and arrive at last at a primordial cell. ”

“ Women are less than ever impressed with the sacredness and nobility of maternity, and look upon it more and more as a period of martyrdom. This attitude is in consonance with the crave for ease and luxury that is beginning to possess us.
It is, however, no new phase in human experience. It characterised all the civilisations of ancient times, at the height of their prosperity, and was really the beginning of their decay.
Women with us are more eager to limit families than are their husbands. They feel the burdens of a large family more. ”

“ Whatever doubt may exist in the minds of moralists and philanthropists as to the ethics of prevention in the face of poverty, there can be no doubt that prevention by those able to bear and educate healthy offspring, without hardship, is a pernicious vice degrading to the individual, and a crime against society and the State. ”

“ If healthy happy citizens are the State's ideal, then limitation of population well within the space and food will be encouraged. If national wealth and prosperity in its material aspect are the State's ideal, the harder the population presses on the means of subsistence the sooner will that ideal be realised. For it cannot be denied, that the greater the stress and hardship in life, the more strenuous the effort put forth to obtain a foothold. The greater the competition the keener the effort, and the higher the accomplishment ”

“ If a man's wages has to be divided between two, then between three, then four, six, eight, ten, while all the time that wages is not increasing, have we not a direct cause of poverty, and, moreover, is not that cause first in time and importance?
Later on in the history of the family their poverty will become a cause of an increase in the children born to them. At first they may struggle to prevent an increase, but, when they are in the depths of hopeless poverty, they will abandon themselves to despair. ”

“ The State in her humanitarian sympathy, and in New Zealand it is extravagant, puts forth every effort to improve the conditions of its "submerged tenth." Insanitary conditions are improved, the rooms by law enlarged, the air is sweetened, the water is purified, the homes are drained. The delicate and diseased are taken to our hospitals, the deaf and blind to our deaf-mute institutions, the deformed and the fatherless to our orphan homes. ”

“ Statistics and physicians from their observation agree in this, that the bearing of children by normal women, so far from being injurious to health, is as healthful, stimulating, and invigorating a function as the blooming of a flower, or the shedding of fruit, and a mother is no worse for the experience of maternity than is the plant or the tree for the fruit it bears. ”

“ There is a class in every large community, whose sense of responsibility in life is at zero, whose self-control is substituted by the law and its sanctions, and whose modes and habits of life are little better than those of the lower animals. Their appetites are stronger, their desires, though fewer, are more intense, and their self-control less easily and less frequently exerted than those in the highest planes of life. ”

“ Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion between the rates of increase in population and food, and the consequent struggle for existence.
All living organisms require food and space. The power of multiplication in plants and animals is so great that food or space is sooner or later entrenched upon, and then commences this inevitable struggle for existence. ”

“ In New Zealand there is no oppressive misgovernment, there is no land question in the sense in which Nitti applies the term, there is no poverty to account for a declining birth-rate or to confuse the problem. There is prosperity on every hand, and want is almost unknown. And yet, fewer and fewer children, in proportion to the population, and in proportion to the number of marriages, are born into the colony every year. ”

“ The fertility of the unfit goes on unrestrained by any other check, save vice and misery. The great moral checks have not, and cannot have any place with them. But the State is, by its humanitarian zeal, limiting the scope and diminishing the force of these natural checks amongst all classes of the community, but especially amongst the unfit, so that its policy now fosters the fertility of this class, while it fails to arrest the declining nativity of our best citizens. The greater the fertility of the unfit, the greater the burden the fit have to bear, and the less their fertility. ”