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, prostitutes 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 prostitutes, 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 prostitutes, 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 spawn 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 pronounced 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 constitute a rural community. Out of this community we can trace those who have gone to the cities and become murderers, prostitutes 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.”
Concerning crime and delinquency, we find that all evidence tends to show that an alarming increase is in progress although satisfactory data are hard to obtain. It is certain that there is a tremendously disproportionate increase in the number of prisoners in recent years compared with general population, for while the total population has increased three and one-half fold, the prison element has increased fifteen fold. According to Wier, in this country there are four and one-half times as many murders for every million of our population to-day as there were twenty years ago.
It may be urged that this increase in prison population is not a disproportionate increase in the number of defectives or criminals, but only an increase in the number sent to prison, and this is probably a partial truth—but when we recall such pedigree as those of the Nams, the defective line of Kallikaks and other known unsound strains, he must be hopeful indeed who can find much consolation in this supposition. In any event, no such uncertainty exists regarding the number of murders and homicides, since these have in all probability been as fully recorded in the past as at present.
Vicious Surroundings Not a Sufficient Explanation in Degenerate Stocks.—It is sometimes urged that we are not dealing in such cases with degenerate strains, but merely with unfortunate individuals who have been subjected to pernicious surroundings from the beginning. And it can not be denied that parents who are mentally defective, dissipated or syphilitic afford most noxious developmental and environmental conditions for their children. But when one notes how intimately the moral degeneracy in such stocks is bound up with some degree of feeble-mindedness, he is strongly skeptical toward the sufficiency of such an interpretation, although environment undoubtedly intensifies the results. Concerning this point Davenport says:
“We have certain methods of testing whether it is bad environment or bad breeding which produced these people. Some of the children have been taken at an early age and ‘placed out’. We have traced their subsequent history. In most cases they have turned out quite as bad as those who have remained at home. In a few cases they have turned out well, but it is also true that some of the children who remained at home in bad environment have turned out well.”
And to Davenport’s testimony may we add that of Doctor Wilmarth, who, speaking of children at the home for feeble-minded, says:
“In no place is this subject of the power of heredity in relation to environment so easily studied as among our children. A group of many little children came to us from the state school, being untrainable there. They have had with us the same teaching and the same companionship. Each one has lived, eaten and slept among the others, and, so far as we know, with but one exception, those of vicious parentage have turned instinctively to vicious traits by preference, while those of simple but honest stock do evil things only under strong temptation, and do not persist in them after the wrong is pointed out.”