“In the work of our institute,[14] which represents the most thoroughgoing research into the genetics of criminalism ever undertaken in this country, we have with the help of parents and others carefully studied nearly 1,000 young repeated offenders. We have found that no less than 7½ per cent. of these are ordinary epileptics, and we have reason to suspect others. This by no means represents the total number of epileptics seen in connection with juvenile court work, where, of course, first offenders as well as large numbers of dependents are seen. In addition to my above enumeration, other cases seen by the Detention Home physicians and myself amount up to many scores of cases. If one remembers that it is ordinarily calculated that one person in every 500 is epileptic, the significance of this high criminal percentage is clear, and the practical bearing of it is still further accentuated by the fact that some of the worst repeaters are epileptics, and that many of the gravest crimes are committed by those unfortunates. The connection between epilepsy and crime has everywhere been recognized by students of the subject, but it apparently needs constant emphasis in order that common sense steps may be taken toward guardianship of these who suffer from a disease which wreaks such extravagant vengeance on society.”
Mental Disorders Most Frequently Associated With Crime.—Doctor Charles Mercier, an English authority on crime and insanity, in enumerating the mental disorders most frequently associated with crime, places the insanity of drunkenness first. Any one who will take the trouble to verify the facts in his own community will find that a large percentage, frequently considerably over half, of the arrests made by the police are for acts committed while the offender was more or less under the influence of alcohol. Next to drunkenness among mental disorders which lead to crime Doctor Mercier places feeble-mindedness. Next to feeble-mindedness comes epilepsy; then paranoia or systematized delusion; next paresis; and lastly melancholia.
Paranoics are peculiar in that they are particularly apt to attack persons of prominence. Highly egotistical, they almost invariably believe themselves or some one or some cause dear to them, the subject of a plot, perhaps to rob them, to torture them, to steal their inventions or literary productions, or to persecute them in some way. Two if not three of our murdered presidents owe their assassinations to paranoics. Many rulers have been attacked and some killed by such insane individuals. Most of the “cranks” who write threatening letters are lunatics of this type.
Of the kinds of mental unsoundness known to be inheritable which are of special significance from the standpoint of crime and delinquency undoubtedly feeble-mindedness ranks first. We have already seen that as our methods for detecting the higher grades of feeble-mindedness become more accurate we disclose in border-line cases a veritable hot-bed of mental incapacity suitable for the engendering of the criminal and the vicious. Here in addition to some of the more pronounced criminal types belong hosts of our chronic petty offenders, our sexually vicious and our “won’t-works”. One interesting outcome of a recent investigation into the army of unemployed in England was the discovery of the general unfitness of these unemployed. In our own country the habitually unemployed are so not because of lack of work, but largely because it is unprofitable to employ them.
The Bearing of Immigration on Crime and Delinquency.—Perhaps in no field more than this of crime and delinquency, especially in so far as it is based on innate deficiency, does the gravity of the immigration question impress itself on us. How stupendous this problem[15] has become may be realized from the fact that according to the census of 1910, 13,345,545, or one out of seven of the inhabitants of the United States, were foreign born. And if we add to these the 18,897,837 of whom one or both parents were of foreign birth, we reach the astonishing total of over 32,000,000, or more than one-third of our total population, who are foreign born, or who have one or both parents of foreign birth.
During the decade from 1900 to 1910, 8,500,000 foreigners came to the United States, of whom 5,250,000 remained to make a permanent home. This shows how rapidly our whole population might be radically changed. In recent years the source of our immigrants has shifted proportionately from northwestern Europe to southern and eastern Europe (Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia), and whether for weal or woe this new blood must inevitably leave its impress upon us. Does it not behoove us then to seek with anxious eyes some knowledge of these invading hordes with whom we are to mingle our life-blood?
Even the most superficial examination may well cause us grave concern. We find that in one year (1908) at Ellis Island alone, 3,741 paupers, 2,900 persons with contagious disease, 184 insane, 121 feeble-minded, 136 criminals, 124 prostitutes and 65 idiots were denied entrance, and yet, according to the estimate of Doctor F. K. Sprague, of the United States Public Health Service, probably only about 5 per cent of the mentally deficient and 25 per cent. of those who will become insane have been detected. When confronted by such data we can begin to realize what we are facing. Others estimate that from 6 to 7 per cent. of the immigrants who are now arriving are feeble-minded. We learn further that recently while the foreign-born population of New York state was about 30 per cent., the foreign-born population of the insane hospitals of the state was over 43 per cent., and at one time approximately 65 per cent. for New York City. In one year (1908) 84 per cent. of the patients in Bellevue Hospital, New York City, were of foreign parentage. Paresis, which probably always has syphilis as its antecedent, is proportionately twice as prevalent among foreigners as among natives in New York City.
But from the standpoint of inheritance, however great the danger may be from classifiable defectives, it is probably far greater from that much larger class of aliens we are now receiving with open arms who are below the mental and physical average of their own countries. Moreover, with our present system of inspection there is no way of detecting the grades of feeble-mindedness above idiocy and imbecility in the great numbers of foreign children under five when brought in, who are beginning to show up in alarming numbers in the schools of some of our larger cities. About thirty per cent. of the annual increment of our population is due to immigration and not to births; and once in our country the alien far outbreeds the native stock, with relatively little increase in death-rate, thus making a double contribution to the increase of population. When we take all these facts into consideration it certainly is high time that we arouse from our self-complacent attitude and consider the whole question of immigration most earnestly.
In spite of the fact that many individuals are caught in the net of inspection at our portals, it is clear that still more rigid rejection[16] is imperative. The inspectors at our various ports are doing the best they can under the circumstances, but there are at present too few of them and they are too restricted in their powers to meet the situation satisfactorily. Moreover, when at one of our ports in one year (1910), of 1,483 immigrants certified by the inspecting surgeons as unfit to land because of serious mental or physical defects, 1,370 were landed anyway, it is evident that there is a strong and reprehensible pull somewhere to evade the obvious intent of the law.
It remains for us as a people to decide whether we shall continue to let the large employers of cheap labor, the railroad and steamship agents and brokers, who care nothing about the innate fitness of the immigrants they bring, determine the character of our future population, or whether we shall insist on a proper regulation of this flood so that we may receive only an honest, intelligent, industrious and healthy stock. To continue to absorb these aliens with as little selection as we now do is nothing short of criminal carelessness. Let us not be deceived by the promptings of a misguided sentiment, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” The voice is Jacob’s voice, nor should this voice of the easily persuaded, the sentimentalist, the interested organization to which the relatives of the defective alien belong, or any other pressure move us from our obvious duty of refusing to fasten upon this country an incubus of degeneracy for which we as a nation are in no way responsible.