The Task of Social Hygiene. Havelock Ellis
is still very inadequate, and he is opposed to eugenics by Act of Parliament.
[23] E. Solmi, La Città del Sole di Campanella, 1904, p. xxxiv.
[24] Only a year before his death Galton wrote (Preface to Essays in Eugenics): "The power by which Eugenic reform must chiefly be effected is that of Popular Opinion, which is amply strong enough for that purpose whenever it shall be roused."
[25] It may perhaps be necessary to remark that by sterilization is here meant, not castration, but, in the male vasectomy (and a corresponding operation in the female), a simple and harmless operation which involves no real mutilation and no loss of power beyond that of procreation. See on this and related points, Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," chap. xii.
[26] The term "feeble-minded" may be used generally to cover all degrees of mental weakness. In speaking a little more precisely, however, we have to recognize three main degrees of congenital mental weakness: feeble-mindedness, in which with care and supervision it is possible to work and earn a livelihood; imbecility, in which the subject is barely able to look after himself, and sometimes only has enough intelligence to be mischievous (the moral imbecile); and idiocy, the lowest depth of all, in which the subject has no intelligence and no ability to look after himself. More elaborate classifications are sometimes proposed. The method of Binet and Simon renders possible a fairly exact measurement of feeble-mindedness.
[27] Mott (Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, Vol. V, 1911) accepts the view that in some cases feeble-mindedness is simply a form of congenital syphilis, but he points out that feeble-mindedness abounds in many rural districts where syphilis, as well as alcoholism, is very rare, and concludes by emphasizing the influence of heredity; the prevalence of feeble-mindedness in these rural districts is thus due to the fact that the mentally and physically fit have emigrated to the great industrial centres, leaving the unfit to procreate the race.
[28] "Whether germinal variations," remarked Dr. R.J. Ryle at a Conference on Feeble-mindedness (British Medical Journal, October 3, 1911), "be expressed by cleft palate, cataract, or cerebral deficiency of the pyramidal cells in the brain cortex, they may be produced, and, when once produced, they are reproduced as readily as the perfected structure of the face or eye or brain, if the gametes which contain these potentialities unite to form the ovum. But Nature is not only the producer. Given a fair field and no favour, natural selection would leave no problem of the unfit to perplex the mind of man who looks before and after. This we know cannot be, and we know, too, that we have no longer the excuse of ignorance to cover the neglect of the new duties which belong to the present epoch of civilization. We know now that we have to deal with a growing group in our community who demand permanent care and control as well for their own sakes as for the welfare of the community. All are now agreed on the general principle of segregation, but it is true that something more than this should be forthcoming. The difficulties of theory are clearing up as our wider view obtains a firmer grasp of our material, but the difficulties of practice are still before us." These remarks correspond with the general results reached by the Royal Commission on the Feeble-minded, which issued its voluminous facts and conclusions in 1908.
[29] See, for instance, A.F. Tredgold, Mental Deficiency, 1908.
[30] The investigation of Bezzola showing that the maxima in the conception of idiots occur at carnival time, and especially at the vintage, has been held (especially by Forel) to indicate that alcoholism of the parents at conception causes idiocy in the offspring. It may be so. But it may also be that the licence of these periods enables the defective members of the community to secure an amount of sexual activity which they would be debarred from under normal conditions. In that case the alcoholism would merely liberate, and not create, the idiocy-producing mechanism.
[31] Godden, Eugenics Review, April, 1911.
[32] Feeble-mindedness and the other allied variations are not always exactly repeated in inheritance. They may be transmuted in passing from father to son, an epileptic father, for instance, having a feeble-minded child. These relationships of feeble-mindedness have been clearly brought out in an important investigation by Davenport and Weeks (Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, November, 1911), who have for the first time succeeded in obtaining a large number of really thorough and precise pedigrees of such cases.
[33] It may be as well to point out once more that the possibility of such limited depreciation must not be construed into the statement that there has been any general "degeneration of the race." It maybe added that the notion that the golden age lay in the past, and that our own age is degenerate is not confined to a few biometricians of to-day; it has commended itself to uncritical minds in all ages, even the greatest, as far back as we can go. Montesquieu referred to this common notion (and attempted to explain it) in his Pensées Diverses: "Men have such a bad opinion of themselves," he adds, "that they have believed not only that their minds and souls were degenerate, but even their bodies, and that they were not so tall as the men of previous ages." It is thus quite logically that we arrive at the belief that when mankind first appeared, "there were giants on the earth in those days," and that Adam lived to the age of nine hundred and thirty. Evidently no syndromes of degenerescence there!
[34] The Superintendent of a large State School for delinquent girls in America (as quoted in the Chicago Vice Commission's Report on The Social Evil in Chicago, p. 229) says: "The girls who come to us possessed of normal brain power, or not infected with venereal disease, we look upon as a prize indeed, and we seldom fail to make a woman worth while of a really normal girl, whatever her environment has been. But we have failed in numberless cases where the environment has been all right, but the girl was born wrong."
[35] See e.g. Havelock Ellis, The Criminal, 4th ed., 1910, chap IV.
[36] R.L. Dugdale, The Jukes, 4th ed., 1910. It is noteworthy that Dugdale, who wrote nearly forty years ago, was concerned to prove the influence of bad environment rather than of bad heredity. At that time the significance of heredity was scarcely yet conceived. It remains true, however, that bad heredity and bad environment constantly work together for evil.
[37] Jörger, Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschafts-Biologie, 1905, p. 294. Criminal families are also recorded by Aubry, La Contagion du Meutre.
[38] Even during school life this burden is serious. Mr. Bodey, Inspector of Schools, states that the defective school child costs three times as much as the ordinary school child.
[39] I have set forth these considerations more fully in a popular form in The Problem of the Regeneration of the Race, the first of a series of "New Tracts for the Times," issued under the auspices of the National Council of Public Morals.