Property in its early forms means the domination of the powerful over the weak. Social institutions develop out of this primitive tyranny, where the caprice of owners crushes the personality of the masses, towards a state of equal rights and opportunities for all. The industrial classes emerge from slavery and serfdom into a wage system, which in turn is modified in the direction of fair wages, short hours, and security of employment—fundamental conditions for personal development.
The family has arisen from the private property of a despot to the mutual coöperation of lovers, and the woman becomes a person instead of a chattel. The legal successor of polygamy—the slavery of women—is not monogamy, but prostitution, which is the wage system of the sexes, grounded on the subordinate position of women and their meagre opportunities for self-support.
Government is passing into democracy, and property in land and capital is being hedged about by the police and taxing powers, or diffused and socialized in the interest of the personal equality of all.
Social evolution is therefore the evolution of freedom and opportunity, on the one hand, and personality, on the other. Without freedom and security there can be no free will and moral character. Without exalted personality there can be no enduring freedom. The educational environment, therefore, which develops personality must itself develop with freedom. The ruling ideas of justice, integrity, morality, must move in advance, else the personality of individuals will not survive the temptations of freedom. To what extent, therefore, can education modify the individual? The answer is to be sought in the problems of heredity and degeneration.
The human degenerate is essentially different from the animal degenerate. The latter is solely a physical product, and by losing certain organs is better fitted for survival, as parasites and snakes.
Human degenerates, however, do not form a new type, but are on the decline to extinction. They are those who lack personality; that is, they are not moulded into harmony with a social environment which unfolds self-consciousness. They are strictly biological only when they are congenital and therefore not educable. They are social degenerates when they are the product of a degraded education. Both factors are radical. A born idiot can never be other than an idiot. On the other hand, the deprivation during childhood and youth of language and education, as shown by Caspar Hauser, or the wolf-boy of Agra, or the experiment of Emperor Akbar, leaves the normal natural endowments as idiotic as though they never existed. The two factors vary independently through all degrees. Education ranges from the slums to the pure firesides. The congenital equipment varies from the idiot to the genius.
The relative weight of these two factors is a matter of statistics. Absolutely speaking, heredity is everything; relatively, its social significance depends upon the actual proportion of abnormal to normal births.
The highest estimate I am able to make of the total number of degenerates, both born and induced, is five and one-half per cent of the population, as follows:
Estimated Total of Defectives Per Million Population.
| Census estimate (1890). | ||
| Insane | 1,697 | |
| Feeble-minded | 1,526 | |
| Deaf and Dumb | 659 | |
| Blind | 805 | |
| Prisoners | 1,315 | |
| Juvenile delinquents | 237 | |
| Almshouse paupers | 1,166 | |
| ———— | 7,405 | |
| Outdoor Criminals (five times the number of inmates) | 7,760 | |
| Tramps (McCook, 1895, New Haven Conference of Charities and Correction, 85,768) | 1,308 | |
| Drunkards (Crothers, 1893, Chicago Conference, 1,200,000, equal to about 10 per cent of voting population) | 19,000 | |
| Prostitutes (weighted average of Levasseur’s estimate for rural (600) and urban (11,200 to 17,200) France, in “La Population Française,” vol. ii, p. 434) | 5,000 | |
| Outdoor Paupers (weighted average of report at Nashville Conference, 1894, 46 per cent in Penna. to 2.2 per cent in N. Y.) | 15,000 | |
| ————— | ||
| 55,473 |