The Pall Mall Gazette, on March 4th, 1908, gave the utmost prominence to an article of mine on this subject, entitled “An Urgent Public Scandal, The Case of London's Inebriates.” In this article I quoted The Times letter referred to above, and levelled the most vigorous indictment I could against the authors of the outrage under discussion. None of them ventured to reply. In the Referee for March 8th, 1908, however, a member of the Public Control Committee of the London County Council made an attempt to defend its action. The curious reader may refer to that letter as one more instance of that absolute blindness to the nature of the problem and to any question of the future which had already been indicated in The Times letter from the Chairman of the Committee. Taking these two letters together, we may say that never has a public outrage committed by men in authority been more lamely or ignorantly defended.
Ignorance in action—the present facts.—Since the beginning of January, 1908, the brutal course decreed by the London County Council has been pursued. The wretched and deeply-to-be-pitied women have been and are being discharged at the rate of some twenty to twenty-five per month as their terms expire. The wiser sort of magistrates and the police-court missionaries are at their wits' ends, and no wonder. This country offers these women at the moment no refuge whatever; nothing but the degrading and destructive round—police-court, prison, public-house, pavement; da capo. Writing to The Times in relation to the correspondence there published (April 18th, 1908) between the London County Council and the Eugenics Education Society, Sir Alfred Reynolds, Chairman of the State Inebriate Reformatory Visiting Board and a Visiting Justice of Holloway Prison, said (April 21st, 1908):—
“The correspondence published in The Times of April 18, between the London County Council and the President of the Eugenics Education Society convinces me more than ever that the dispute between the London County Council and the Treasury is a scandal and folly of the worst description. For the sake of 6d. per case per day, the London County Council (the same body which receives half a million sterling from the sale of intoxicating liquor) has made it impossible for the metropolitan magistrates to carry out the Act of 1898, and the result is that 500 of the worst female inebriates are alternately on the streets or in prison again, and the former scenes of horror and drunken violence reappear. Holloway Prison will soon fill up again, and all the good which has been done during the last few years will be lost.... I will not trouble you further, except by emphasising what I have said by adding that since January last year 1,500 women have been notified to Scotland Yard as always in and out of prison from the County of London, are qualified for inebriate homes, and at the present moment there are over 50 of this number in Holloway Prison serving absolutely useless short terms of imprisonment.”
The London County Council performs a service for philosophy.—As we have seen, there exists or seems to exist a radical antagonism in certain groups of cases between the interests of the individual and the interests of the race. You may preserve the quality of the race, as the Spartans did, by exposing defective infants; you may be kind to feeble-minded children, as we are, but you will injure the race in the long run. Darwin saw this more than a generation ago, but instead of suggesting the prohibition of parenthood to the unfit, he said that we must bear the ill effects of their multiplication rather than sacrifice the law of love. Huxley similarly said that moral evolution consisted in opposing natural evolution. Now it has for some time been evident that this antagonism need not be radical if, whilst devoting hospitals and charity and medical science to the care of the unfit, we deny them the privilege of parenthood. On the other hand, the London County Council by its present action has performed a service to biological philosophy by showing that it is possible to combine the maximum of brutality to the individual and to the present with the maximum of injury to the race and to the future. In his report for 1906 Dr. Branthwaite cites the history of a girl who, at the age of fifteen years and nine months, was convicted in 1881 for being drunk and disorderly. During the next quarter of a century she was sentenced 115 times, and in January, 1906, was sent to a reformatory. She has twice attempted to commit suicide. Her case is, of course, now hopeless, and Dr. Branthwaite predicts that her life will end by suicide. Let any one read Dr. Branthwaite's Report or Dr. Robert Jones's account of Jane Cakebread, or let him acquaint himself with instances as they are to be daily seen, and he will agree that the maximum of brutality is no excessive phrase to describe the policy of shame at present pursued in London: if, indeed, seeing that we now have knowledge, it should not be described as something still worse.
As for the injury to the future, we already know what the present policy effects. We may grant, then, to the London County Council that it has performed a service for philosophy in showing that it is possible to combine both kinds of evil in one harmonious policy. Nor let the reader suppose that any partisan feeling infects this protest. The Government is also to blame. Even had the L.C.C. declined to contribute anything at all to the cost of the proper policy, no really educated and honourable Government had any choice but to undertake all the cost itself—even at the cost of office! Better were—in Mr. Balfour's words, the wisest he ever uttered—“the barren exchange of one set of tyrants, or jobbers, for another,” than the horrible birth of thousands of feeble-minded babies.
The argument from economy.—It would be easy to show that the present policy is not economical even as regards the cost of these women themselves, and even if it be assumed that gold is wealth. But consider the remoter cost. During the period when the present writer was making public protests very nearly every day on this matter without any immediate effect, and only one month after the London County Council had attempted to defend itself on the ground of economy when challenged by the Eugenics Education Society, there was formally opened, with a flourish of trumpets, the eighty-seventh school for feeble-minded children established by the London County Council. It accommodates sixty such children (besides sixty physically defective). This school cost £6,000 to build alone. The sixty feeble-minded children whom it accommodates are not a very large proportion of the 7,000 admittedly feeble-minded school children in London—a number which is probably not more than a third or a fourth of the real number. It has been exhaustively proved that feeble-minded children are mainly, at any given time, the progeny of feeble-minded persons such as constitute the majority of chronic inebriates. Ignorance is again in action. On the one hand, the London County Council, quarrelling over pence, effectively suspends the working of the Inebriates Acts, and thus ensures that the supply of feeble-minded children shall be kept up. On the other hand, it takes these children, cares for them until they are capable of becoming parents, and then turns them upon the world. The Chairman at the opening ceremony of the school referred to said that “at the special schools work was being done which would advance the intelligence of the pupils, and thus benefit the entire race.” It would be difficult to concentrate more ignorance in fewer words or in ten times as many.