MIND AND BODY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume LIII, Issue 4871, 16 February 1933, Page 4

MIND AND BODY.

Some evidence of physical inefficiency in the population of Great Britain was presented by Dr. C. J. Bond, of Leicester, in an address to the Eugenics Society. He said that in spite of all the expenditure of time, money and energy during recent years on education-.- national health work and the relief of poverty and unemployment, to-day one in every 10 persons was too glull to earn a living unaided, one in 200 was or had been mentally afflicted, and one in 120 was, feeble-minded. The tendency of the birth control movement had been to reduce the numbers of children born in the more highly pducated, more skilled and more successful, rather than in the less prosperous and less lit, social groups, Birth control, therefore, to that extent had had a dysgenic effect on the population as a whole. Much ..of the present day social legislation was not founded on sound biological principles. Helping the weak, necessary though it was, was done at the expense of the normal citizens, and was actually providing for handing on the burden of human inefficiency, defect and misery in an aggravated form to future generations. Thoughtful citizens were beginning to realise that if the great advance in medical knowledge was to secure the best results for humanity as a whole, then the. medical horizon must be extended to include also the health and welfare of future generations. Dr. Bond said that a great step would be gained if the nation were led to realise more deeply and to act on the conviction that the future of the race, it might be the future of Western civilisation, depended ultimately on the innate capacity, the mental and bodily qualities, of the population.