CHAPTER X
RACE BETTERMENT THROUGH HEREDITY
Most of us have heard in one form or another the fairy story of the youth on adventure bent, who was captured by the giant and under dire penalty in case of failure was set the task of sweeping out the giant’s stable before sundown. The peculiarity of this stable, it will be recalled, was that, as fast as the refuse was swept out at the door an even greater quantity poured in through the windows so that the sweeper, just in proportion to his zeal, became more and more encumbered with his burden.
A Questionable Form of Charity.—Though we smile at the childishness of this legend, are we not as a civilized people attempting through our charities a feat parallel to that of this unfortunate youth? We foster and favor our social wastage with the inevitable result that it runs riot under our sheltering hand and deluges us with an ever accumulating flood of its like. For are we not constantly building more asylums, sanitaria and prisons, to preserve more unfit, to produce more defectives, to require still greater numbers of asylums, sanitaria and prisons, to preserve more unfit, and so on in unending progression?
At nearly every period of history there have been certain individuals who have seen the necessity of a state eliminating its supply of defectives.
Past Protests.—For instance, we find the importance of this strongly urged by Plato. After pointing out the fact that the shepherd, in order to maintain the standard of his flocks, bred only from the best individuals, as did likewise the huntsman with his dogs and horses, and the fancier with his various pets, Plato went on to show the danger to the state of allowing the constantly increasing body of defectives and degenerates to multiply their kind. Repeated expression of the same idea has occurred from time to time during the succeeding centuries.
Little heed was paid to these remonstrances, however, with the result that is known to us all. To-day, “the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome” is still sung by the poet, but the original nations themselves have long since passed into the night.
An Increasing Flood of Defectives.—Strive to ignore the unpleasant facts as we may, we have to admit that the same problem of what the human harvest shall be is with us in grave form to-day. The alarming phase of the situation, however, lies in the fact that we are facing an ever increasing flood of social wastage.
But why this increase of defectives? It can not be attributed to oppression, to grinding poverty, or to decline in attention to our sick and needy, for never was prosperity greater, never were charities more flourishing, never such activity in the search for palliatives and cures. The simple fact is that we are breeding our defectives. The human harvest like the grain harvest is based fundamentally on heritage. And to get a better crop of human beings, we must, as with other crops, weed out bad strains.
To whatever source of information we turn the facts are essentially the same. Abroad we find that in England, for example, the ratio of defectives to normals more than doubled between 1764 and 1896. At home, from the investigation of Davenport and Weeks we learn that in the state of New Jersey the number of epileptics doubles every thirty years. And other investigators estimate that the fecundity of mental defectives in general is about twice as great as that of the average of our population. In a recent report of the New York State Board of Charities we read, “There are about thirty thousand feeble-minded persons in the state of New York, of whom four thousand are intermittently sequestered while twenty-six thousand who are a menace to society are at liberty and may produce the unfit.” And a passage from the last Massachusetts report reads as follows: “We have been obliged to refuse a very large number of applicants for the admission of feeble-minded women—many of whom have given birth to one or more children. The prolific progeny of these women almost without exception are public charges from the date of their birth.”