Table C 33 is a comparison of the frequency of the various causes of unfitness as between those qualified for the one year's voluntary service and the recruits in general. This table is very remarkable, because it shows the preponderance of general weakness, diseases of the heart and large vessels, and pulmonary defects among the former.
Military Fitness and Secondary Schools.
Percentage of unfit to every 100 recruits examined.
Figure C 33.
It goes without saying that the schools are only responsible to a lesser degree for this; we have to deal here with a serious symptom of a bad constitution amongst the higher social grades which betrays itself also in the dying out of the socially prominent families. How badly their progeny comes off, in spite of the great care bestowed on it, is illustrated in Table C 34. In two Munich Regiments the percentage of fit among all those entitled to offer themselves for the one year's service from the most varied parts of Germany was only, according to Dieudonné, 21.6, 20.1, and 16.4.
Great anxiety is justly caused by the increasing number of those taken care of in public Lunatic Asylums. It remains doubtful to what degree this may be due to the greater use made of asylums and the decrease of the care of the mentally infirm in the family home; the deterioration of the nervous system nevertheless remains according to the general impression an incontestable fact. As a symptom of this may be interpreted the increasing number of suicides in civilised countries, demonstrated in Rüdin's Tables, C 35 and C 36, showing the number of suicides in every one million of inhabitants.
More serious still than the frequency of mental and nervous diseases is another phenomenon which demonstrates how unsatisfactory is the constitutional condition of large circle of our population of to-day.
This phenomenon which as yet has received much too little attention is the large scale on which families die out, at first in the male line. Apparently (sufficient observations for control are not available) those families which hold an eminent economical or social position (aristocracy, old county families, etc., etc.) are mainly concerned. Because exceptional endowment in one or more respects (intelligence, talent, will power, etc.) is generally required to secure or to maintain a leading position, and because such endowment is given to only a small fraction of the population, but is inherited largely by the progeny, this dying out of the leading families means a serious loss to the race.