2Section III.V. L. Kellogg.
with which it is in close relation, since persons following certain classes
of occupation, as1, for instance, the members of the liberal professions, and
clerks and other salaried employees are most numerous in towns.
It does not appear that in France casual and unskilled labourers, persons
in the receipt of Poor Law relief, etc., are specially prolific. There is
not thus in reality too much risk of seeing the renewal of the population
carried out in a dangerous manner by its least valuable section. However,
even among the working classes, the most highly paid occupations are not
those among which one finds the greatest number of children.
The economic, social, or moral burden of children is a factor bound
up in a complex manner, not only with the individual conditions of existence,
but also with the transformations of society, progress in manners and
customs, and the conception which one forms of life.
It is this burden which must be allieviated where allieviation would be
most effective and produce the best results, in order to put a stop to a move
ment which may be dangerous to civilisation.
EUGENICS AND MILITARISM.
(Abstract.)
B, Vernon L. Kellogg.
(Professor in Stanford University, California.)
The claim that war and military service have a directly deteriorating
influence through military selection on a population much given to mili
tarism, has been clearly stated by von Liebig, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer,
Tschouriloff, Otto Seeck, David Starr Jordan, and others, not to mention
the ever-anticipating Greeks. Military selection may be conceived to work
disastrously on a population both through the actual killing during war by
wounds and disease of the sturdy young men selected by conscription or
recruiting, and also by the removal from the reproducing part of the
population of much larger numbers of these selected young men both in
war and peace times. Another phase of the racial danger from military
service is the possibility of the contraction of persistent and heritable disease
which may be carried back from camp and garrison with the return of the
soldiers to the population at home.
As likely as seem all these and certain other anti-eugenic influences
arising from military selection, the substantiation of their actual results on
a basis of observed facts is necessary to give them real standing as eugenic
arguments against militarism.
