Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall.

  • McDougall, William, 1871-1938.
Date:
1924
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Ethics and some modern world problems / by Willam McDougall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    charitable agencies undertake to provide for every child that any couple may fortuitously bring into would not have a family at all until there was a place for them”' (p. 282). In addition various States enforced laws against the mar¬ riage of unqualified persons; e.g. in Wurtemberg no subject could marry until he possessed “the right of a member of a community or a settled non-freeman. But even such a one must prove to the magistrate before his marriage that he possesses sufficient means of subsistence. The want of such means of subsistence is considered as existing, (a) in every one who is not primarily qualified in the exercises of a liberal art or science, or for exercising on his own ac¬ count, commerce, a profession, agriculture or some other business sufficient for the independent support of a family; and (b) in every one who, at the time of the intended marriage, is the subject of polit¬ ical or police investigation, for vagabondage, prodigality, habitual idleness, notorious propensity to drinking, or repeated fraud, theft or begging ... or has received assistance from public funds for his own support” (p. 283). I cite this evidence at some length because it reveals the secret of the control of population in Europe from the early medieval to the modern period. No doubt the older more primitive checks remained operative in some degree, as they still do; but in the main they seem to have been replaced by a system of more or less deliberate social control. And a point of extreme importance is that this social control must have operated in the main eugenically, confining parenthood to the prudent, the competent,, the industrious, the skilful and the successful. This social control, continued through several centuries must have done much to maintain the qualities of the populations by which it was exercised and may even have raised considerably the average level of “civic worth.” Two influences have combined to suspend in the modern era this social control and to reverse the eugenic tendency to breed from the upper strata of society; first, the social chaos of the industrial age; secondly, the unchecked extension of the universal ethics at the cost of national ethics, leading to a state of affairs in which the privileges of marriage and parenthood are regarded as the right of every man without respect to his per¬ sonal qualifications for discharge of the correlative responsibilities. In modern discussions of the minimum wage this all-important aspect of the social problem is never considered; it is assumed with-