Many are supported by friends and relatives, but year by year, it is becoming more noticeable, that the moral guardians of the unfit are shirking their responsibility and handing their defective relatives over to the State and demanding their gratuitous support as a right.
Dr.MacGregor, Inspector of Asylums and Hospitals, N.Z., in his report for 1898, p.

5, says:-- "As if the State had a vested interest in the degradation of its people, I find that they, as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, are responding to our efforts to sap their self-respect by doing their utmost to throw the cost of maintaining their relatives on the ratepayers.

I constantly hear the plea urged that as taxpayers and old colonists they have a right to send their relatives to State institutions." Our social conditions manufacture defectives, and foster their fertility.

The strain and stress of modern competition excite an anxiety and nervous tension under which many break down, and much of the insanity that exists to-day is attributable to nervous strain in the struggle of life.
The strong attractive force of one social stratum upon the next below, excites in the latter a nervous tension which predisposes to a breakdown in the face of some adversity.
The passion for ease and luxury, and the dread of poverty tend to overstrain the nervous system, and numberless neurotic defectives fall back upon society, and give themselves up to the propagation of their kind.
Our charitable aid institutions tend largely to swell the numbers of the great unfit.
Dr.MacGregor in one of his valuable and forcible reports upon our charitable aid institutions, says:-- "Our lavish and indiscriminate outdoor relief, whose evils I am tired of recapitulating,--our shameless abuse of the hospital system,--the crowding of our asylums by people in their dotage, kept there because there is no suitable place to send them to, and many of them sent by friends anxious only to be relieved of the duty of supporting and caring for them,--what is it all coming to ?"...
"The practical outcome of our overlooking the continued accumulation of degenerates among our people by our fostering of all kinds of weakness will necessarily be, if it continues, that society will itself degenerate.

Taxation will increase by leaps and bounds, and the industrious and self-respecting citizens will rebel, especially if taxation is expected to meet all the demands of a legislature that puts our humanitarian idea of justice in the place of charity." It has already been urged that there is no evidence of any physiological defect in any class of society interfering with fertility.