STATE CONTROL

Greymouth Evening Star, 20 May 1938, Page 8

STATE CONTROL

FUTURE MARRIAGES. The Slate control of all marriages within the next, twenty-five years as a necessary measure to preserve the quality of the race was forecast by Sir Farquahar Buzzard, Regius Professor of .Medicine at Oxford University, states the "Manchester Guardian.” He was speaking on “Fitness and Eugenics" al. the Ideal Home Exhibition in the series of doctors’ lectures organised by the British Medical Association as a contribution to the national fitness campaign. “The State interferes with the liberty of a criminal because he is harmful to the community,” he said. “There can be no doubt, that the consequences of ill-advised marriages are equally damaging, much further reaching, and’ almost impossible to estimate.” Discussing the need to raise the standard of national health. Sir Farquhar said that the population might he divided into three categories. Perhaps 5d per cent, were individuals who might be regarded as of average or normal fitness, 20 per cent, might be super-normal, and 30 per cent, subnormal. “Under present economic conditions the subnormal have every encourage-

ment to produce large families, which are again subnormal. The normal and supernormal art' charged with the burden of supporting rhe subnormal, and are tempted' or even forced to remain sterile- or limit the number of their children. It. docs not require the brains of a senior wrangler to calculate the. ultimate effect, of such a system. “We are confronted not only with a declining birth-rate, already an established fact, but. with the prospect of a. ]':(:|)iilaiioii in which the unfit will outnumber the til.” 'the proposals he put forward to avert this danger wore an intensive study of human heredity in a geographically limited area and a longterm endowment to finance research, the more general education of children in biology, with special reference to heredity, the introduction of some form of statutory authority for marriage involving an investigation ci the personal ami family health of the contracting parties, and’ some form of economic encouragement towards raising a fit family. , “The medical man.” he summed up, “cannot, he blind to the amount of ill health and unhappiness due to her-

edity causes, and therefore looks longingly forward to the time when more knowledge of and more intelligent. application of eugenic principles combine to eliminate one great source of hitman suffering."