Secondly, there was everything to favour motherhood. Here religious precept and ethical tradition joined with stem necessity to the same end--the end which always meant a new and strong beginning for the next generation. Even to-day all observers are agreed that infant mortality is at a minimum amongst the Jews; their children are superior in height and weight and chest measurement to Gentile children brought up amidst poverty far less intense in our own great cities; _in a better material environment, but a far inferior maternal environment_. The Jewish mother is the mother of children innately superior, on the average, since they are the fruit of such long ages of stringent parental selection, and she makes more of them because she fails to nurse them only in the rarest cases, when she has no choice, and because in every detail her maternal care is incomparably superior to that of her Gentile sister. Given a high standard of motherhood in a highly selected race, what other result than that we daily witness and envy can we expect? Thirdly, the Jews do not abuse alcohol, and thus avoid one of the few causes of true racial degeneration apart from selection of the worst for parenthood. * * * * * If these principles are valid, it is evident that our redemption from the fate of all our predecessors is to be found only in Eugenics--the selection of the best for parenthood. In his address to the Sociological Society in 1904, in which he defined this term, Mr. Galton named as one of the duties before the Society, “historical enquiry into the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the population at various times, in ancient and modern nations.” “There is strong reason for believing,” he continued, “that national rise and decline is closely connected with this influence.”[81]