The previous chapter suggests that unless due regard is given to heredity an increased population will merely aggravate the existing social problems. It is necessary also to emphasise the importance of watching our death statistics as well as our birth returns. Obviously a nation with a low percentage of births compared with its population may be increasing the latter much more largely as well as more healthily than a nation with a much larger percentage of births. The pulse of each hand must be felt. Infant mortality is as easily ascertainable and is of at least equal importance. Infant efficiency is unfortunately less easily ascertainable statistically. Subject to these qualifications the Eugenics school welcomes Mr. Roosevelt's protests against Race Suicide, and gladly identifies itself with any religious, political or social effort to bring to our citizens a sense of what we owe to the commonwealth. It is not a matter to be dismissed with a speech or a magazine article when we see almost every career in the world glorified, and parentage alone sneered at. Believers in Eugenics regard with a horror based on a certainty of evil consequence when they contemplate a State in which the noble task of motherhood is left to the poor while the rich evade their duties. It is stupid as well as abominable to reproach heroic but uninstructed mothers of the less wealthy classes. Year after year they think they are fulfilling their destined purpose in life by adding to their families a burden difficult to bear. In the long run, after Nature has exercised a cruel elimination, this burden of the individual becomes the glory of the race, the very bloom and blossom of the future. Neither can reproach be given to the parents in the slums. Nature here seems to be prodigal indeed. The children come, only the doctors know the terrible tale of them. To the registrar they are but a name, to the statistician a number, but to the City and the State they mean cemeteries, hospitals, prisons, asylums, as well as barracks. But I am not dealing here with the whole problem of poverty. Eugenics aims at breeding the fittest from the fittest and it sees "How many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear." Even in the most unpromising surroundings one sees noble sparks of life not to be quenched by poverty or any other vital enemy. The Christ continues to be born in a stable.