probably have the same effect there, in reducing the birth rate, as they have
had in Europe and North America. Until that equilibrium of production and
reproduction comes it will be a counsel of humanity to disseminate the
knowledge and means of contraception. Ideally parentage should be a
privilege of health, not a by-product of sexual agitation.
Is there any evidence that birth control is dysgenic–that it lowers the
intellectual level of the nation practicing it? Presumably it has been used
more by the intelligent than by the simple, and the labors of educators are
apparently canceled in each generation by the fertility of the uninformed.
But much of what we call intelligence is the result of individual education,
opportunity, and experience; and there is no evidence that such intellectual
acquirements are transmitted in the genes. Even the children of Ph.D.s must
be educated and go through their adolescent measles of errors, dogmas, and
isms; nor can we say how much potential ability and genius lurk in the
chromosomes of the harassed and handicapped poor. Biologically, physical
vitality may be, at birth, of greater value than intellectual pedigree;
Nietzsche [Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm (1844-1900)] thought that the best
blood in Germany was in peasant veins; philosophers are not the fittest
material from which to breed the race.
Family limitation played some part in the history of Greece and Rome. It
is amusing to find Julius Caesar [Caesar, Caius Julius (100-44 B.C.)]
offering (59 B.C.) rewards to Romans who had many children, and
forbidding childless women to ride in litters or wear jewelry. Augustus
[Augustus, Caius Octavius, Emperor of Rome (r. 27 B.C.-A.D. 14)]
renewed this campaign some forty years later, with like futility. Birth
control continued to spread in the upper classes while immigrant stocks
from the Germanic North and the Greek or Semitic East replenished and
altered the population of Italy.
Very probably this ethnic change
reduced the ability or willingness of the inhabitants to resist governmental
incompetence and external attack.
