Recently she has visited Denmark and had the privilege of investigating the working of the Poor-law system. The official view was obtained, and workhouses, etc., visited, and the system seen in operation. But also by a visit to Salvation Army Headquarters in Copenhagen, and from other sources, she obtained as thorough an idea as possible of the actual working of the nation's remedies for poverty. Also the connection of the Poor Law with the Municipality was studied.
She also undertook a literary investigation into deterioration of human personality, viewed from the psychological, medical, and religious points of view, writing an essay which won the Gibson Prize at Girton (1905).
It seemed to be the necessary corollary to the acquisition of a wide collection of facts to form some unitary theory capable of correlating them.
A very simple theory, which will be found to accord with Plato's diagnosis of the degeneration of a State or an individual, with Meyer's "Disintegrations of Personality," and with James' "Phenomena of Religious Experience," therefore underlies this essay; but it is apart from its objects to do more than state it. It is enunciated more fully in an article in the Contemporary Review, now out, entitled "Mankind in the Making." It is this:—
(a) The psychology of the individual retraces the path of the psychology of the race.
(b) In any given individual the whole path climbed by the foremost classes or races may not be retraced. Therefore numbers of individuals are permanently stranded on lower levels of evolution. Society can quicken evolution by right social arrangements, scientific in principle.
(c) Granted that any individual attains a certain psychical evolution in normal development, either evolution or devolution lies before him. Wrong social conditions lead to widespread devolution. The retrograde unit retraces downwards the upward path of the race, and can only be reclaimed along this path by wise social legislation, bringing steady pressure to bear along the lines of evolution, (barring extraordinary religious phenomena, which often reclaim individuals or communities).
(d) Society has now arrived at a point of development when these facts must be recognised, and the whole question of the organisation of humanity put on a scientific basis. It will then be possible to reduce the sciences of sociology and psychology to scientific order, and our national treatment of such questions as vagrancy will be no longer purely empirical.[1]
Note.—The Committee on Vagrancy, before which the author appeared as a witness (see [Appendix IV.]), was sitting during the months occupied in the writing of this book. Its conclusions, with which the author is in substantial agreement, are therefore added in the form of notes and appendices.
This Preface was not originally written as such, but formed the introduction to the Gamble Prize Essay, in connection with which the essayist was required to furnish a history of personal research in connection with the subject chosen.