Being Well Born Part 15

=The Exceptionally Able Child Likely to Be Neglected.--=However, while we must not forget that it is important to recognize backward children and to see that they are segregated into small groups which are not required to do the full amount of work in regular time, it is equally urgent to see that the unusually bright individual is also given opportunity to advance more rapidly than the rank and file. Only too often the holding back of a child in school leads to lack of interest and habits of mental laziness, and sometimes to truancy and incorrigibility. The general attempt in our graded schools to keep all children close to the average is to be strongly condemned.

=Cost of Caring for Our Mentally Disordered.--=Doctor Charles L. Dana, member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, estimated in 1904 that the actual cost of caring for feeble-minded and insane in the United States amounted to sixty million dollars, to which should be added the corresponding loss in industrial activity on the part of the afflicted,--at least twenty million dollars more, and he figures that the amount was increasing at the rate of four per cent. per annum. Many investigators concur in the opinion that our insane and feeble-minded alone cost us far above one hundred million dollars. Adding to this economic burden the cost of our delinquents and criminals the total expense becomes stupendous. And when we consider still further the even greater burden of suffering of the unfortunates themselves and the sorrows of those to whom they are dear, a burden not measurable in money, the feeling that something must be done to relieve the situation becomes overpowering.

=Importance of Rigid Segregation of Feeble-Minded.--=As regards the really feeble-minded little can be done beyond making them as happy as possible and developing the limited gifts they have been given by nature. Their teaching must be in the main concrete and simple. At the age of p.u.b.erty it is imperative to see that the s.e.xes are separated and kept under sufficient permanent supervision to prevent all possibility of procreation. There is neither economic nor common sense in even allowing the remotest chance of such occurrences as the following: "This is the case of a feeble-minded and epileptic woman who had six children by various persons while an inmate of a county poor house. One child at the age of eighteen died in the almshouse, two died in infancy, one was epileptic (the son of a man with a criminal record) and two who are now living in the almshouse are feeble-minded, one being the son of a negro."

Again, we find a superintendent of an English almshouse reporting that one hundred and two out of one hundred and five children born there in five years were feeble-minded.

As conditions are to-day every inst.i.tution for the feeble-minded has a long waiting list and the same is true of most asylums for the insane.

Instead of providing the prolonged care necessary for such patients, inst.i.tutions are forced to discharge many prematurely in order to make room for more urgent cases.

=Importance of Early Diagnosis of Insanity.--=In insanities, even when of hereditary origin, there is much hope in certain cases of greatly benefiting the individual, though a permanent cure, or at least the establishment of procreative fitness may be impossible. It is extremely important that the public realize how much can be done through early examination and advice in such mental afflictions. Most of the insane who recover usually do so within a few months of their first alienation, hence the importance of losing no time in detecting the condition and securing early treatment. It is now well known that many cases of chronic insanity may be measurably improved under the care of a psychiatrist by systematic re-education, especially in industrial lines. But how little of this may be expected at the hands of the untrained custodians who "feed" the inmates of our county almshouses, to which in many states the chronic insane are entrusted, is obvious.

=All Insane Should Be Pa.s.sed Upon by Competent Psychiatrists.--=The atrocious system of turning the chronic insane over to county poorhouses manned by supervisors whose chief qualification for the position has not infrequently been the lowness of their bid for boarding and caring for the inmates, can not be too strongly condemned. Incredible as it may seem, in some states the court can on its own judgment send patients directly to these inst.i.tutions without first submitting them to the study of expert physicians in the state hospital for the insane. The viciousness of such procedure is evident when one realizes that often careful scrutiny on the part of the very best experts, extending over a considerable period of time, is required before the true condition of the patient can be determined. Recently a psychiatrist of high standing, who was gathering data on county asylums for a national organization, informed the writer that beyond the shadow of a doubt he had come across case after case in county asylums which would have been curable under proper treatment.

Here again the responsibility in last a.n.a.lysis must rest upon us as citizens, for it is largely through our intelligent demands as voters that conditions will be improved and competent experts be put in charge of county asylums as well as of the state hospitals for the acutely insane.

=Some Insanities Not of Hereditary Origin.--=Some alienists believe that self-poisoning known as _auto-intoxication_, due to improper elimination of poisons generated through faulty digestion or metabolism, if of long standing, may be not only a contributory but a more or less direct cause of insanity. About twenty per cent. of insanities of men living in cities and about fifteen per cent. of those living in the country seem to be directly related to the intemperate use of alcohol. The corresponding figures for women are seven per cent. and one per cent. respectively.

General paresis or softening of the brain is probably invariably preceded by syphilis. About twenty-two and five-tenths per cent. of the first admissions to hospitals for the insane from city-dwelling men, and eight per cent. from men living in the country in the state of New York are cases of this kind of insanity. The corresponding figures for women are five and five-tenths per cent. and two and five-tenths per cent.

respectively.

=Importance of Heredity in Insanity Not Appreciated.--=We have already seen that heredity plays an important part in insanities. There can be little doubt that the tendency is to under-estimate rather than over-estimate its importance. Many cases said to be "caused" by mental strain such as those occasioned by domestic infelicities, business reverses and the like should in all probability be fundamentally attributed to something far more deep-seated than the more obvious cause.

In many such instances there is little doubt that an inherent weakness in mental make-up exists which predisposes the individual toward mental breakdown. This is more apparent when one recalls that there are thousands of other individuals who undergo equally great or greater calamities without loss of mental balance. There are well-recognized types of mental disposition which later contribute to corresponding forms of insanity. In many instances the final catastrophe may be averted if the "peculiar"

individual can be kept in good health and guided into right habits of thought. Undoubtedly certain infectious diseases, arterio sclerosis, various poisons in the blood, child-birth, and similar influences often enter as important contributory factors. In all cases of cure, however, we must face the fact that under existing conditions these mentally restored individuals are released into society without let or hindrance as regards their marital relations.

CHAPTER IX

CRIME AND DELINQUENCY

=The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in This Field Uncertain.--=The whole question of crime and delinquency is a highly complex one. Here, perhaps, more than in any other phase of race betterment we find the greatest difficulty in separating the effects of hereditary predisposition from the results of unfavorable environment.

While there is no longer a reasonable doubt about such nervous disorders as epilepsy, feeble-mindedness and certain forms of insanity being rooted largely in ancestral taints, the degree to which crime or delinquency is based on heredity is far more questionable. Every student of genetics knows that we may have dwarf plants because the const.i.tution of the germ is of a nature to produce only such individuals, or we may have dwarfed plants because of adverse conditions of soil and lack of an opportunity to climb or rise to their full capacity. Bateson pertinently remarks, "The stick will not make the dwarf pea climb, though without it the tall can never rise. Education, sanitation, and the rest are but the giving or withholding of opportunity." The important sociological question for us to determine is which of these lowly peas of the human family are really dwarfs and which are dwarfed simply because the stick of opportunity on which to climb is lacking.

Beyond doubt a considerable portion of crime and degeneracy is due in large measure to innate inclination, but with just as little doubt much is the effect mainly of vicious habits acquired through an unwholesome environment. A normal appet.i.te or impulse may be given a pathological trend by bad influences. And one has to reckon, moreover, with degrees of hereditary apt.i.tude to crime. Just what is the measure of normality? To what extent by developing to their highest point certain inhibitive or opposing tendencies, can we counteract certain inherent proclivities for wrong-doing? By what means shall we sift the congenital defectives from the victims of suppressed opportunities? These and kindred questions confront us at the very outset of our studies of crime and delinquency. It is obvious that although we may inst.i.tute the strictest elimination of the socially unfit, unless we can provide a wholesome environment for the fit, lapses into unfitness are sure to recur.

=Feeble-Mindedness Often a Factor.--=The conviction is steadily growing among students of human heredity that a considerable amount of crime, gross immorality and degeneracy is due at bottom to feeble-mindedness and that, therefore, if we can once eliminate feeble-mindedness, these vicious accompaniments will at the same time in equal measure disappear. G.o.ddard, for example, one of our authorities on the inheritance of feeble-mindedness, is convinced that a large proportion of the delinquent girls who fill our reformatories are actually feeble-minded. They are often the higher grade or moron type, and their mental condition remains unsuspected because they have never been thoroughly tested in this respect.

=Many Delinquent Girls Mentally Deficient.--=According to Havelock Ellis, 2,500 of some 15,000 women who pa.s.sed through Magdalen homes in England were definitely feeble-minded and were known to have added a thousand illegitimate children to the population.

The preliminary reports of the so-called white slave investigations now in progress in New York City cla.s.ses 25 per cent. of these unfortunate women as mentally incapable of taking care of themselves. Other investigations indicate that from 40 to 60 per cent. of this cla.s.s of women are defectives. For example, from the report of the Ma.s.sachusetts "Commission for the Investigation of the White Slave Traffic, So-Called," one reads: "Of 300 prost.i.tutes, 154, or 51 per cent., were feeble-minded. All doubtful cases were recorded as normal. The mental defect of these 154 women was so p.r.o.nounced and evident as to warrant the legal commitment of each one as a feeble-minded person or as a defective delinquent.... The 135 women designated as normal, as a cla.s.s were of distinctly inferior intelligence. More time for study of these women, more complete histories of their life in the community, and opportunity for more elaborate psychological tests might verify the belief of the examiners that many of them were also feeble-minded or insane."

The data from some of our public reformatories, industrial schools and state homes for delinquent girls, are very instructive in this respect.

Reports from a number of such inst.i.tutions show that many of their inmates are mentally subnormal. The proportions range from thirty-three per cent.

in the New Jersey Reformatory at Rahway to eighty-nine per cent. in the inst.i.tution at Geneva, Illinois.

=Inst.i.tutional Figures Misleading.--=However, significant as are these figures from inst.i.tutions for delinquents, one should not be misled by them. They are undoubtedly not representative of offenders in general, but of a selected group of the most hopeless cases. In the first place the more capable individuals escape the dragnet which lands the defective delinquents in an inst.i.tution, and furthermore, because of liberal systems of probation, only the more incorrigible or the very stupid make up the bulk of the population of such places. Miss Augusta F. Bronner, a.s.sistant director of the Psychopathic Inst.i.tute of the Juvenile Court of Chicago, from a careful study of five hundred and five cases of delinquent boys and girls in the Detention Home, chosen with as little selection as possible, finds the proportion of mentally subnormal among them to be less than ten per cent.

=Many Prisoners Mentally Subnormal.--=Doctor Walter S. Fernald, of the Ma.s.sachusetts School for Feeble-minded, estimates that "at least 25 per cent. of the inmates of our penal inst.i.tutions are mentally defective."

Among the various available estimates at hand this seems to be a fairly conservative approximation. Hastings H. Hart points out that this calculation of 25 per cent. means that there are 20,000 adult defective delinquents in prison, and 6,000 youths in juvenile reformatories, or a total of 26,000 in custody in the United States.

=The Inhibitions Necessary to Social Welfare Not Well Established in All.--=But let us look at this matter of delinquency a little more in detail. In common with other living creatures mankind has two strongly predominating instincts without which there can be no prolonged individual or racial existence, namely, the self-preservative and the reproductive.

Says Schiller: "While philosophers are disputing about the government of the world, Hunger and Love are performing the task." Under self-preservative would be included everything pertaining to food, property and self-protection. In addition, however, man, together with certain other social animals, has developed a third set of activities or instincts--an impulsion toward the preservation of the community to which he belongs--and so far has this evolved in his case that it outranks in importance the other two. For the highest accomplishments and ideals of the race are in last a.n.a.lysis expressions of this social instinct. But with this system of mutual help comes the necessity of certain restraints, because for society to exist its members must impose upon themselves, or have imposed upon them, certain inhibitions of their self-preservative and reproductive instincts.

Being a late acquisition of the race and less firmly ingrained, the social instinct is not well established in all individuals. Some have it sufficiently strong to exercise of their own accord the necessary inhibitions of other instincts. Experience has shown that others, either through a lack or through a wrong cultivation of it, can not or will not do so unaided. For the latter, society has inst.i.tuted certain conventions and the criminal law whereby through a system of restraints and punishments such an individual is held in check either by actual physical restraint of his property or person or through the powerfully inhibitive factors of shame or fear. Man as a normal member of society must constantly take heed of the physical, intellectual or moral danger the exercise of a given feeling, action or procedure on his part will bring to humanity, and govern himself accordingly.

But it is in just these very inhibitions that mental defectives are lacking. They are almost invariably anti-social types because they are unable to establish the personal abstentions which are necessary for the good of the community. While in the individual of innate normal mentality anti-social traits may have developed because of improper training or surroundings, in mentally defective types some factor or factors necessary to normality have been left out of their make-up and as a result they are often wholly lacking in social instincts or have these so feebly developed that education and exhortations toward social ideals are fruitless. We can not appeal successfully if there is nothing to appeal to; we can not develop something out of nothing.

=The High-Grade Moron a Difficult Problem.--=One great difficulty in identifying the high-grade morons who are a bountiful source of our criminals is our almost universal failure to recognize that a memory test alone is not sufficient to determine the mental responsibility of an individual. Not only memory, but judgment, will-power and perhaps, also, to a lesser degree, the powers of attention and concentration are all indispensable elements in the make-up of a normal individual. There are cases on record of imbeciles with prodigious memories, yet hopelessly incapable of caring for themselves or of respecting the rights of others.

In fact certain types of morons, usually cunning, often prepossessing and superficially clever, are characterized by good memories and will _moralize_ volubly, although their wills are too weak to inhibit impulses when they face temptation. It is obvious that just in proportion as the intelligence of the high-grade degenerate approaches normality and yet remains abnormal, the more dangerous he may become to society.

=Degenerate Strains.--=A number of family records are now available which show convincing evidence of the hereditary nature of a degeneracy which finds expression in pauperism, immorality and crime.

As has already been pointed out, there is reason to believe that much of this is based in some degree on feeble-mindedness. One of the most remarkable of these is the recent study on degeneracy by G.o.ddard as set forth in his book called _The Kallikak Family_. The record is that of six generations of descendants from an original progenitor to whom the fict.i.tious name of Kallikak has been a.s.signed. This individual, descended from good stock, before his marriage met a feeble-minded girl by whom he became the father of a feeble-minded son. Later he married a normal woman by whom he had normal children. Thus from one normal father have sprung two lines of progeny, one vitiated with feeble-mindedness, the other normal. The comparison may be readily made by drawing up in parallel columns the data as follows:

LINE A LINE B

In five generations 480 direct In five generations 496 descendants descendants from a normal father from the same normal father as in father and a feeble-minded Line A and a normal mother have the mother have been accounted for following record: as follows:

143 known to be feeble-minded. All but one of normal mentality.

291 mental status unknown or Two men known to be alcoholic.

doubtful.

36 illegitimate. One case of religious mania.

33 s.e.xually immoral, mostly Among the rest have been found prost.i.tutes. nothing but good representative citizens.h.i.+p, numbering doctors, 24 confirmed alcoholics. lawyers, educators, judges, traders, etc.

3 epileptics. No epileptics or criminals.

82 died in infancy. Only fifteen children died in infancy.

3 criminals.

8 keepers of disreputable houses.

46 only ones known to ben ormal.

Certainly there is abundant food for thought in these two records.

If we take still other families of criminal or degenerate antecedents the same multiplication of viciousness, as a rule, is in evidence. Thus, _Margaret, the Mother of Criminals_, has left a progeny of some 700 paupers, prost.i.tutes and criminals, some of the women bearing as many as twenty children. The famous Jukes family, so often cited, with its 310 professional paupers, 300 deaths in infancy, 440 physical wrecks from debauchery, 50 prost.i.tutes, 60 habitual thieves, 7 murderers, and 130 other convicts out of a total 1,200 descendants who have been identified, has alone cost the state of New York $1,250,000 in the care of its criminal, defective and immoral progeny.

Another family record, the Zeros, reported by Poellman, of Bonn, starts with a female confirmed drunkard. In six generations of her descendants, totaling 800 people, Poellman found 102 professional beggars, 107 illegitimates, 181 prost.i.tutes, 54 in almshouse, 76 convicted of serious crime, 7 of murder, and costing some $1,206,000. Or we might cite the so-called _Tribe of Ishmael_, the progeny of a neurotic man and a half-breed woman. They have spread their ill-favored sp.a.w.n over various of the central states in a veritable flood of imbecility and petty crime. And to these families may be added the records of _The Hill Folk_, _The Pineys_, or others of the several recent studies of degenerate strains.

All bear the same message of rapidly multiplying degeneracy.

=Intensification of Defects by Inbreeding.--=Most of these regional surveys that are now in progress show that there is particular danger in a population becoming broken up into small communities and isolated. Under such conditions there is a p.r.o.nounced tendency to intermarry, and if deterioration is already present in the stock such communities become centers of marked degeneracy. The situation is well exemplified in the following excerpt from Davenport:

"I have been going over the records of one family in New York, the so-called Nam family. There were 55 per cent. consanguineous matings, marriage between cousins, in one generation, and, owing to the fact that the strain was already loaded with defects, we can see how these defects were concentrated by these cousin marriages, so that about 90 per cent. of the strain is feeble-minded. There were fully 90 per cent. of the men who are unable to resist the lure of liquor.

One-fourth of the children are born illegitimates. Infanticides, incest, murder, harlotry, are all over the chart. This is a highly inbred community, keeping a nearly pure strain of social defects, and the cost to the community has been a million and a half on a fair way of figuring, not directly in the care, but indirectly in the damage they have done. These const.i.tute a rural community. Out of this community we can trace those who have gone to the cities and become murderers, prost.i.tutes and thieves. They are not confined to one state; they spread out over the country. One branch of the family came to the state of Minnesota. We sent to one of Doctor Rogers' trained field workers to learn whether she had ever heard of this family, and received a reply that the family was well known to social workers in the state of Minnesota. These strains of degenerates are not local matters at all; they are matters of national interest."