The least fit have the worst environment, and in the worst possible surroundings the progeny of the unfit multiply and develop.

They are born into conditions, well described by Dr.Alice Vicery, in a paper on "The food supplies of the next generation." "Conditions in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal state, cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which the pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation in which the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave." What possible hope can there be for the progeny of defectives born with vicious, criminal, drunken or pauper tendencies, into an environment whose whole influence from infancy to maturity tends to accentuate and develop these inherited defects?
In this pitiable stratum of human society, vice and misery, as checks to increase, reign supreme, but as no other check exists, fertility is at its maximum, and keeps close up on the heels of the positive checks.
The State in her humanitarian sympathy, and in New Zealand it is extravagant, puts forth every effort to improve the conditions of its "submerged tenth." Insanitary conditions are improved, the rooms by law enlarged, the air is sweetened, the water is purified, the homes are drained.

The delicate and diseased are taken to our hospitals, the deaf and blind to our deaf-mute institutions, the deformed and the fatherless to our orphan homes.

And all are carefully nursed as tender precious plants.

They are snatched from Nature's clutch and reared as prize stock are reared and kept in clover, till they can propagate their kind.
We feed and clothe the unfit, however unfit, and then encourage their procreation, and as soon as they are matured we foster their fertility.
No want of human sympathy for the poor unfortunates of our race is in these words expressed,--a statement simply of the inevitable consequences of unscientific and anti-social methods of dealing with the degenerate.
No State can afford to shut its eyes to the magnitude of this problem.
The procreation of the unfit must be faced and grappled with.