ABSTRACT
In Great Britain during the War non-commissioned officers and privates on active service were paid family allowances proportioned to the number of their dependants. Other European countries, notably Belgium, have followed the lead of France, and have even gone beyond her in enthusiastic application of the family allowance principle to wage-payments in all the major industries. It is clear, then, that while the justice and the economic expediency of family allowances are now widely recognized, their power for good or evil over the composition of any population has as yet received only very slight practical recognition. A widespread system of family allowances may, in short, be highly dysgenic or powerfully eugenic: and the essential difference between a dysgenic and a eugenic system is that in the former the allowance is made according to a flat rate, the same for all.
