It has always appeared to me that these unfortunate defective people are truly our sin-bearers, for they reap to the full the consequences of our mistakes; they inherit the results of a pernicious order of affairs. The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. Cursed from their infancy with a fatal blight; expected to arrive at a moral standard which is wholly beyond them; tormented in childhood by vain attempts to force them to the level of other children; the small stock of intelligence—which love, the great educator, might in some instances have developed to a limited extent—dwarfed and dissipated by impatient ignorance; objects too often of the heteropathy of which Miss Cobbe speaks so feelingly in her exquisite work entitled “Duties of Women;” these unhappy sufferers are surely spectacles fit to move the pity of gods and men.
Yet, in cases where the nerves, by means of which alone the moral sense can manifest itself, are altogether wanting, these are the very persons who are glibly declared to be utterly bad. Just because they are deficient, just because reformatory efforts can have no effect upon them, it is thought excusable, and even laudable, to bestow upon them hatred and scorn. And it frequently happens that those who so readily mete out their hatred and scorn, believe that the Carpenter of Nazareth ate with publicans and sinners, and consorted with those who were possessed of devils; that the woman taken in adultery was not condemned; that the dying thief on the cross was admitted to Paradise.
To care for the defective; to bestow on them the love that has been withheld; to reverence them as the bearers of our common sins; to mitigate their sufferings and shield them from injustice; this seems to me the most Christlike work that can be undertaken by any philanthropist in any age.
But some of these cases are not hopeless. If we have but knowledge and patience enough to place them in the best conditions, much may be done for the greater number of distorted beings. The longer we withhold our aid, the less are our chances of success. Their original surroundings are generally bad, owing to the same tendencies being inherited more or less by other members of their families. And we must remember that, in the treatment of nervous disease, we may show our wisdom quite as much by what we refrain from doing as by what we do. We must not start with the idea that we have to work a sudden reformation, but that we have to allow the organism room to grow naturally and in the right direction. We cannot create moral growth, or growth of any kind, but we can minister to it and promote it by placing the organism in the conditions where it shall absorb the largest amount of nutriment—of vitality,—and we can then direct the pressure which determines its form.
We constantly see around us instances of persons, not naturally defective, who have been subjected to lifelong distortion. In an enlightened community this should be impossible. Place in a low conservatory a plant that has a capacity for growing into a forest tree; withhold from it the needed nutriment, and it will remain dwarfed; deprive it altogether either of the food which it must assimilate in order to maintain vitality, or of the light and air without which waste cannot be promoted and function performed, and our plant must die. Give it all these necessaries, but keep it in the low conservatory, and when it reaches the roof of the building it will remain stunted or grow awry. Perhaps the nutriment that ought to have enabled it to shoot upwards will go into the lower branches, and the tree will become misshapen.
Does not this often happen to the human plant? Is not its lower nature developed at the expense of the higher, because bounds are set to its upward development?
The highest type of human being, then, is not merely that which has the most vitality, but also that which can distribute it in due proportion to its various parts, and that which has been permitted to expand naturally in right directions. The extent to which we possess this vitality,—the power we have of assimilating the force stored up in our food, to repair waste and ensure growth,—is largely determined by heredity.
True, this fact is in some quarters violently disputed; but not, I think, in quarters deserving of much attention. Distorted people are generally vehement, and resort to bare assertion and flat contradiction when observation, analogy, and rational argument are all with their opponent. It is well, perhaps, when the perverted force-current can steam off so harmlessly instead of working mischief in other channels; just as it is well when excitable political speeches and articles save us from dangerous secret organisations.
A young lady once declined to entertain the idea of heredity for a moment, on the ground that, supposing her to be the unfortunate possessor of a grandmother who was a monster of wickedness, she would be expected to prove herself a monster of wickedness likewise. It was in vain for a gentleman present to point out that we usually have more than one grandmother, and that if her other grandmother happened to be an angel of light, she might with equal justice be expected to develop angelic characteristics. She saw her side of the argument, but not his. As a matter of fact, we know so little of the numbers of ancestors from all of whom we may inherit, and we understand so little of the conditions determining the inheritance of given characteristics, that we are not yet in a position to entertain expectations at all. All we know is, that we do not generally get so far as finding grapes on thorns and figs on thistles. The interesting subject of heredity still offers a wide field to the observer. So far, physiological revelation does but prove the truth of the Biblical revelation—that nothing is of ourselves, but that all is of God.
On the one hand too much has been made of heredity, and on the other hand too little. Sometimes its warnings are wholly disregarded; sometimes disease is regarded as inevitable if it has already existed in a family, and if there are any symptoms of its recurrence, wise precautions being consequently neglected. Good education would often avert the evil. Unfortunately, it is in families displaying neurotic tendencies that education is usually most hopelessly bad. It would be easy to give numbers of instances in the upper classes where nervous disease is, with the best intentions, literally being coined. Heredity does not mean that certain hard and fast qualities are displayed by the parents and inherited by the children, but that certain tendencies may develop—pathologically or otherwise—in suitable surroundings. Insane persons may have no insanity in their families, but may yet have resulted from a combination of neurotic stocks, the conditions in which the utmost might have been made of their defective structure having been denied them. Indeed, the means resorted to in order to reform such people would be ridiculous were not the whole affair so infinitely pathetic. The smile of derision would be oftener on our lips but for the tear of pity which follows close behind it.