This country will gradually fall to Irish and Jews

The Decline in the Birth Rate was published by the Fabian Society in March 1907 and written by the Socialist icon and founder of the London School of Economics, Sydney Webb, Baron Passfield.

Here are a few extracts:

“The small group of three ‘rich’ boroughs has per 100,000 population (corrected) 2004 legitimate births; the four groups comprising nineteen intermediate boroughs have almost identical legitimate birth-rates of between 2,362 to 2,490 per ioo,000; whilst the poorest group of seven boroughs has a legitimate birth-rate of no less than 3,078, or 50 per cent, more than that in the ‘rich’ quarters… 

The group of seven boroughs happens to include, not only those containing the greatest numbers of Irish Roman Catholics but also those in which the great bulk of the Jews are to be found... It is against all the influences of the Jewish religion, tradition and custom to limit the family and the birth-rate among Jews of all classes and all nationalities is known to be large...

It is, as all experience proves, impossible to exclude the alien immigrant. Moreover, there are in Great Britain, as in all other countries, a sufficient number of persons to whom the prudential considerations affecting the others do not appeal, or appeal less strongly.

In Great Britain at this moment, when half, or perhaps two-thirds, of all the married people are regulating their families, children are being freely born to the Irish Roman Catholics and the Polish, Russian and German Jews on the ohe hand, and to the thriftless and irresponsible, largely the casual laborers and the other denizens of the one-roomed tenements of our great cities, on the other.

Twenty-five per cent, of our parents… is producing 50 per cent of the next generation. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews…

In order that the population may be recruited from the self-controlled and foreseeing members of each class rather than of those who are reckless and improvident, we must alter the balance of considerations in favor of the child-producing family…

To the vast majority of women, and especially to those of fine type, the rearing of children would be the most attractive occupation, if it offered economic advantages equal to those, say, of school teaching or service in the Post office. At present it is ignored as an occupation, unremunerated, and in no way honored by the State.”

Thus did Webb, not only bemoan the aggressive fertility of the Irish Catholic and the Jew, he made it clear that he didn’t want the country ‘falling’ to them! None too PC then. I wonder what he would have made of his left-wing intellectual heirs encouraging the ‘reckless and improvident’ fast-breeders of Asia, Africa and the West Indies to press home the ‘national deteriation’ he was warning us of over a century ago?

I wonder what those heirs would make of Webb’s ‘fine type'-friendly eugenic credentials?

Perhaps, amongst themselves, they would have argued that Webb was describing the detested lower orders of Anglo-British origin as ‘thriftless and irresponsible’, and not the Irish and the Jews.

Which, if anyone happened to overhear them making that argument, should surprise no one.

Check out the eugenic provenance of Webb's fellow Fabians, George Bernard Shaw and Harold Laski here.