CRIME AND DELINQUENCY
=The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in This Field
Uncertain.--=The whole question of crime and delinquency is a highly
complex one. Here, perhaps, more than in any other phase of race
betterment we find the greatest difficulty in separating the effects of
hereditary predisposition from the results of unfavorable environment.
While there is no longer a reasonable doubt about such nervous disorders
as epilepsy, feeble-mindedness and certain forms of insanity being rooted
largely in ancestral taints, the degree to which crime or delinquency is
based on heredity is far more questionable. Every student of genetics
knows that we may have dwarf plants because the constitution of the germ
is of a nature to produce only such individuals, or we may have dwarfed
plants because of adverse conditions of soil and lack of an opportunity to
climb or rise to their full capacity. Bateson pertinently remarks, "The
stick will not make the dwarf pea climb, though without it the tall can
never rise. Education, sanitation, and the rest are but the giving or
withholding of opportunity." The important sociological question for us to
determine is which of these lowly peas of the human family are really
dwarfs and which are dwarfed simply because the stick of opportunity on
which to climb is lacking.
Beyond doubt a considerable portion of crime and degeneracy is due in
large measure to innate inclination, but with just as little doubt much is
the effect mainly of vicious habits acquired through an unwholesome
environment. A normal appetite or impulse may be given a pathological
trend by bad influences. And one has to reckon, moreover, with degrees of
hereditary aptitude to crime. Just what is the measure of normality? To
what extent by developing to their highest point certain inhibitive or
opposing tendencies, can we counteract certain inherent proclivities for
wrong-doing? By what means shall we sift the congenital defectives from
the victims of suppressed opportunities? These and kindred questions
confront us at the very outset of our studies of crime and delinquency. It
is obvious that although we may institute the strictest elimination of the
socially unfit, unless we can provide a wholesome environment for the fit,
lapses into unfitness are sure to recur.
=Feeble-Mindedness Often a Factor.--=The conviction is steadily growing
among students of human heredity that a considerable amount of crime,
gross immorality and degeneracy is due at bottom to feeble-mindedness and
that, therefore, if we can once eliminate feeble-mindedness, these vicious
accompaniments will at the same time in equal measure disappear. Goddard,
for example, one of our authorities on the inheritance of
feeble-mindedness, is convinced that a large proportion of the delinquent
girls who fill our reformatories are actually feeble-minded. They are
often the higher grade or moron type, and their mental condition remains
unsuspected because they have never been thoroughly tested in this
respect.
=Many Delinquent Girls Mentally Deficient.--=According to Havelock Ellis,
2,500 of some 15,000 women who passed through Magdalen homes in England
were definitely feeble-minded and were known to have added a thousand
illegitimate children to the population.
The preliminary reports of the so-called white slave investigations now in
progress in New York City classes 25 per cent. of these unfortunate women
as mentally incapable of taking care of themselves. Other investigations
indicate that from 40 to 60 per cent. of this class of women are
defectives. For example, from the report of the Massachusetts "Commission
for the Investigation of the White Slave Traffic, So-Called," one reads:
"Of 300 prostitutes, 154, or 51 per cent., were feeble-minded. All
doubtful cases were recorded as normal. The mental defect of these 154
women was so pronounced and evident as to warrant the legal commitment of
each one as a feeble-minded person or as a defective delinquent.... The
135 women designated as normal, as a class were of distinctly inferior
intelligence. More time for study of these women, more complete histories
of their life in the community, and opportunity for more elaborate
psychological tests might verify the belief of the examiners that many of
them were also feeble-minded or insane."
The data from some of our public reformatories, industrial schools and
state homes for delinquent girls, are very instructive in this respect.
Reports from a number of such institutions show that many of their inmates
are mentally subnormal. The proportions range from thirty-three per cent.
in the New Jersey Reformatory at Rahway to eighty-nine per cent. in the
institution at Geneva, Illinois.
=Institutional Figures Misleading.--=However, significant as are these
figures from institutions for delinquents, one should not be misled by
them. They are undoubtedly not representative of offenders in general, but
of a selected group of the most hopeless cases. In the first place the
more capable individuals escape the dragnet which lands the defective
delinquents in an institution, and furthermore, because of liberal systems
of probation, only the more incorrigible or the very stupid make up the
bulk of the population of such places. Miss Augusta F. Bronner, assistant
director of the Psychopathic Institute of the Juvenile Court of Chicago,
from a careful study of five hundred and five cases of delinquent boys and
girls in the Detention Home, chosen with as little selection as possible,
finds the proportion of mentally subnormal among them to be less than ten
per cent.
=Many Prisoners Mentally Subnormal.--=Doctor Walter S. Fernald, of the
Massachusetts School for Feeble-minded, estimates that "at least 25 per
cent. of the inmates of our penal institutions are mentally defective."
Among the various available estimates at hand this seems to be a fairly
conservative approximation. Hastings H. Hart points out that this
calculation of 25 per cent. means that there are 20,000 adult defective
delinquents in prison, and 6,000 youths in juvenile reformatories, or a
total of 26,000 in custody in the United States.
=The Inhibitions Necessary to Social Welfare Not Well Established in
All.--=But let us look at this matter of delinquency a little more in
detail. In common with other living creatures mankind has two strongly
predominating instincts without which there can be no prolonged individual
or racial existence, namely, the self-preservative and the reproductive.
Says Schiller: "While philosophers are disputing about the government of
the world, Hunger and Love are performing the task." Under
self-preservative would be included everything pertaining to food,
property and self-protection. In addition, however, man, together with
certain other social animals, has developed a third set of activities or
instincts--an impulsion toward the preservation of the community to which
he belongs--and so far has this evolved in his case that it outranks in
importance the other two. For the highest accomplishments and ideals of
the race are in last analysis expressions of this social instinct. But
with this system of mutual help comes the necessity of certain restraints,
because for society to exist its members must impose upon themselves, or
have imposed upon them, certain inhibitions of their self-preservative and
reproductive instincts.
Being a late acquisition of the race and less firmly ingrained, the social
instinct is not well established in all individuals. Some have it
sufficiently strong to exercise of their own accord the necessary
inhibitions of other instincts. Experience has shown that others, either
through a lack or through a wrong cultivation of it, can not or will not
do so unaided. For the latter, society has instituted certain conventions
and the criminal law whereby through a system of restraints and
punishments such an individual is held in check either by actual physical
restraint of his property or person or through the powerfully inhibitive
factors of shame or fear. Man as a normal member of society must
constantly take heed of the physical, intellectual or moral danger the
exercise of a given feeling, action or procedure on his part will bring to
humanity, and govern himself accordingly.
But it is in just these very inhibitions that mental defectives are
lacking. They are almost invariably anti-social types because they are
unable to establish the personal abstentions which are necessary for the
good of the community. While in the individual of innate normal mentality
anti-social traits may have developed because of improper training or
surroundings, in mentally defective types some factor or factors necessary
to normality have been left out of their make-up and as a result they are
often wholly lacking in social instincts or have these so feebly developed
that education and exhortations toward social ideals are fruitless. We can
not appeal successfully if there is nothing to appeal to; we can not
develop something out of nothing.
=The High-Grade Moron a Difficult Problem.--=One great difficulty in
identifying the high-grade morons who are a bountiful source of our
criminals is our almost universal failure to recognize that a memory test
alone is not sufficient to determine the mental responsibility of an
individual. Not only memory, but judgment, will-power and perhaps, also,
to a lesser degree, the powers of attention and concentration are all
indispensable elements in the make-up of a normal individual. There are
cases on record of imbeciles with prodigious memories, yet hopelessly
incapable of caring for themselves or of respecting the rights of others.
In fact certain types of morons, usually cunning, often prepossessing and
superficially clever, are characterized by good memories and will
_moralize_ volubly, although their wills are too weak to inhibit impulses
when they face temptation. It is obvious that just in proportion as the
intelligence of the high-grade degenerate approaches normality and yet
remains abnormal, the more dangerous he may become to society.
=Degenerate Strains.--=A number of family records are now available which
show convincing evidence of the hereditary nature of a degeneracy which
finds expression in pauperism, immorality and crime.
As has already been pointed out, there is reason to believe that much of
this is based in some degree on feeble-mindedness. One of the most
remarkable of these is the recent study on degeneracy by Goddard as set
forth in his book called _The Kallikak Family_. The record is that of six
generations of descendants from an original progenitor to whom the
fictitious name of Kallikak has been assigned. This individual, descended
from good stock, before his marriage met a feeble-minded girl by whom he
became the father of a feeble-minded son. Later he married a normal woman
by whom he had normal children. Thus from one normal father have sprung
two lines of progeny, one vitiated with feeble-mindedness, the other
normal. The comparison may be readily made by drawing up in parallel
columns the data as follows:
LINE A LINE B
In five generations 480 direct In five generations 496 descendants
descendants from a normal father from the same normal father as in
father and a feeble-minded Line A and a normal mother have the
mother have been accounted for following record:
as follows:
143 known to be feeble-minded. All but one of normal mentality.
291 mental status unknown or Two men known to be alcoholic.
doubtful.
36 illegitimate. One case of religious mania.
33 sexually immoral, mostly Among the rest have been found
prostitutes. nothing but good representative
citizenship, numbering doctors,
24 confirmed alcoholics. lawyers, educators, judges,
traders, etc.
3 epileptics. No epileptics or criminals.
82 died in infancy. Only fifteen children died in
infancy.
3 criminals.
8 keepers of disreputable houses.
46 only ones known to ben ormal.
Certainly there is abundant food for thought in these two records.
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."
=By No Means All Delinquents Are Defectives.--=One must not overlook the
fact, however, that _delinquent_ and _defective_ are by no means
synonymous terms, and that many delinquents are with little doubt the
product of adverse social circumstances.
The recent careful work of Doctor William Healy[13] in connection with the
juvenile delinquents of Chicago shows convincingly that the underlying
causations of delinquency are many. Such factors as immorality or constant
quarreling of parents, bad companions, lack of parental control, defective
sense organs, debilitating habits, lack of healthy mental interests and a
host of other environmental factors are not infrequently sufficient in
themselves to develop delinquency in the absence of inherited deficiency.
The present-day efforts of the student of heredity should not be
misunderstood. They are not attempts to make all delinquents out
defectives, but rather to determine what percentage of delinquents may be
legitimately reckoned as defective and to make the facts known. Since
there is no longer any reasonable doubt that, to express it in the mildest
terms, an amount of delinquency far from negligible is due in great
measure to congenital omissions or propensities, then the sooner the
public learns this the better, for we may then set about supplementing our
present efforts at race betterment through external improvement by
devising means of cleansing the fountain source as well.
It can scarcely be doubted that the average man differs little if any in
inherent personality and capacity from many a criminal who is such by
occasion rather than by undue predisposition. Who can truthfully answer
how many individuals there are who are not potentially criminals to some
extent, given sufficient evocative conditions of ignorance, vice, adverse
economic pressure and undue temptation?
"Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied."
=No Special Inheritable Crime-Factor.--=The main difficulty in trying to
find a hereditary basis for crime lies in the multiplicity of things crime
may be. The individual impulsions which lead to certain offenses may be
utterly different from those which conduce to others. Undoubtedly many
inborn tendencies which are perfectly normal or neutral in themselves may
be warped by circumstances into the commission of what are classified as
crimes. The moral man may have the same desire for a thing that the
criminal does, but when he finds that this desire can only be gratified by
injury to others, he inhibits it because of his repugnance to such injury.
The criminal makes no such inhibition.
In general, crime means an offense of some kind against person, property
or state. But a biological analysis of it, could it be made, would require
among other things knowledge of crime in terms of motive or lack of
motive, whether the act was intended to benefit the perpetrator, some
other person, or even the race or state; whether the offense was one of
dishonesty, of cupidity, of lust, or of violence against another.
As a matter of fact no satisfactory classification of crime can be made
since so many factors enter and in such varying degrees. Most
classifications made in our legal codes are a hodge-podge based on a
mixture of motive on the part of the participant, degree of turpitude
involved, nature and extent of the injury inflicted, and the object
against which the offense was perpetrated, whether an individual, society
or the state. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that in many instances
what was crime in the past is no longer so, and vice versa many things
which are regarded as criminal to-day were not considered so in the past.
So the futility of seeking a specific inherent propensity for "crime" is
manifest. How, for instance, in terms of hereditary determiners shall we
draw the fine lines of distinction among those who bribe legislators and
legal officials, those who are avaricious and dishonest in the world of
trade, and those who are wilfully obtuse in providing proper safeguards
for employees?
=What Is Meant by a Born Criminal?--=All we can do is to fall back on the
assurance that any act directly or indirectly injurious to society is an
offense, and that those offenders who are congenitally unable to
distinguish between what is generally accepted as right and wrong, or who
if recognizing this are nevertheless uncontrollably impelled toward or are
unable to refrain from anti-social acts because of some inherent condition
of intellectual or volitional make-up, may be legitimately classed as
individuals born with an aptitude for crime and social transgressions. In
such individuals the natural mental make-up is lacking in some of its
necessary elements so that memory, judgment, or will-power are not up to
the minimum that is necessary for the establishment of proper conduct. In
some cases, apparently, this lack finds expression in almost any kind of
vice or crime into which circumstances happen to lead the individual. In
others, however, there seem to be tendencies toward the commission of
certain types of crime or vice. Certain family strains are characterized
by petty thieving, others by deeds of violence, and still others by sexual
offenses. Certain types of mental defect are closely associated with
certain crimes. Thus sufferers from incipient paresis seem particularly
prone to commit assaults and larceny; epileptics, crimes of brutality and
violence.
=The Epileptic Criminal Especially Dangerous.--=One of the characteristics
of epilepsy, indeed, emphasized by various psychiatrists, is that
frequently it leads to loss of those forms of self-restraint which are
absolutely indispensable to morality and the safety of society. Cruelty,
atrocious sexual offenses and other vicious crimes are the result. It is a
noteworthy fact, moreover, that often in the milder forms of affliction,
where instead of well-marked convulsions only momentary lapses of
consciousness occur, the greatest amount of mental and moral deterioration
and fluctuation is sometimes found.
The situation as regards the epileptic is well presented by Doctor William
Healy, Director of the Juvenile Psycopathic Institute of Chicago, in an
article entitled "Epilepsy and Crime; the Cost", in the _Illinois Medical
Journal_, November, 1912. He says:
"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 7-1/2 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.
To render us safe we should not only have more carefully drawn laws and
more rigid selection at our ports of entry, but we should if possible
also know the stock from which our future citizens come. This is
peculiarly desirable for such defects as feeble-mindedness and various
other mental imperfections, some of which require prolonged observation
for detection. Davenport estimates that it is wholly within the realm of
possibility and good business sense to maintain a corps of trained
inspectors abroad in the chief centers from which our immigrants come who
shall certify the desirable applicants. He makes the point that the
national expense would be far less than the cost of maintaining the army
of defectives we are now admitting to our own country, many of whom almost
immediately become public charges, to say nothing of the hordes of
carriers who though normal themselves, will transmit undesirable traits.
=Sexual Vice.--=As to sexual vice, the skein is indeed a tangled one.
Since nine-tenths of the difficulty centers in a lack of self-restraint,
and inasmuch as the mating instinct is one of the strongest that tugs at
the flesh of humanity, it is obvious that those by nature deficient in
volitional control will almost without exception give way to the call. So
as might be expected the hordes of our feeble-minded and epileptic are
always a source of grave danger in this respect. However, the mentally
enfeebled are by no means the only offenders; indeed, they are probably
not the majority. The true situation is finally dawning on society and the
reformer's call for instruction in "sex-hygiene" resounds through the
land. The whole matter is one of the most perplexing and momentous that
confronts us to-day.
=The Question of School Instruction in Sex-Hygiene.--=While the writer
does not for an instant underestimate the gravity of the situation, and
has only contempt for the nonsense that is palmed off on children about
their origin, or the indelicate self-consciousness which puts under the
ban the discussion of so serious a problem by adults, still he is not
convinced that the universal teaching of the subject to children in
schools by the average teacher, as advocated by some, is to be the
solution of the matter or is even a wise attempt at solution. Yet he
freely admits that he is possibly overfearful of the effects of the
undesirable features of such instruction. True it is that all children do
learn, frequently at an astonishingly early age, about sex, and their
knowledge is usually of an undesirable kind from unreliable and often
vicious sources, and it is equally true that parents, either through
ignorance or prudery, generally can not be depended on to give the child
necessary instruction. But before entering on a wide-spread campaign of
undiluted sex-instruction in schools might it not be more prudent to make
an attempt toward reaching fathers and mothers and convincing them of the
necessity of dealing more frankly and intelligently with their children
regarding sex?
Even to the novice in psychology the powerful nature of suggestion is
known, and with this knowledge before us, is it not wiser to strive in the
main to keep the child's mind off of sex rather than specifically to focus
it on it by special convocations and discourse? If our psychology means
anything, then the worst possible thing we can do for a child is to make
him unduly sex-conscious. Something might be done profitably perhaps in
schools in an unobtrusive way by specially gifted persons, but the
self-conscious way in which most teachers go about topics of sex is
certainly not reassuring to the thoughtful observer as regards the benefit
derived from such instruction. The one evident method of accomplishing
wholesome sex-instruction in schools, devoid of all possibility of
undesirable suggestion and sex-consciousness, is in the form of biological
work where plants and animals are studied in all their relations, the
subject of propagation being taken up in as matter-of-fact a way as the
functioning of any other organ system of plants or animals. In such a
course, long before the subject of sex in higher animals need be
approached the pupil will have developed an attitude of mind which will
lead him to see nothing unusual or suggestive in the function of sex no
matter where it may be found. Incidentally, inasmuch as the manner in
which germs affect living organisms should be studied in such a course
anyway, it would be a simple matter to give all necessary information
about the dangers of infection from venereal diseases.
=Mere Knowledge Not the Crux of the Sex Problem.--=However, desirable as
correct knowledge about sex is, knowledge alone is not the crux of the sex
problem. The moral dangers and abuses that we are trying to circumvent lie
rather in the realm of the emotions than that of the intellect. The
problem must be solved from a broader foundation than mere information.
The all-important consideration is the early establishment of general
habits of self-control so that these may become incorporated in the
nervous organization of the child and become inhibitory anchors against
passions and temptation. Children must be taught to suppress the present
impulse, to sacrifice the immediate pleasure for the more distant or
permanent good. They must be practised in calling up feelings that will
counteract other promptings which if followed blindly are inimical to
social welfare. Their control must come from within not as a matter of
external compulsion. That way character lies.
So in viewing the problem of sexual hygiene the writer feels that our
attempts toward damming the torrents in the adolescent by a belated effort
at verbal instruction on sex-hygiene is at best only a palliative or an
attempt to cure the symptoms of a more deeply-seated, organic, social
malady. The treatment should have been in progress long before in the form
of training in self-control, and in the inculcation of the sense of
dignity and self-respect which springs from the individual's consciousness
of being, not a slave to his desires, but his own master. This, together
with the judicious schooling of boys in a greater chivalry and respect for
womanhood, and of girls in the necessity of meriting such esteem, will, in
my estimation, carry us further than formal courses in sex-hygiene.
=Early Training in Self-Restraint an Important Preventive of Crime and
Delinquency.--=As to crime and delinquency in general, it is evident that
the same early training in self-restraint is a most important factor of
prevention. A wise warden in charge of a large prison says, "Most of these
men are here because they have not learned sufficiently the lesson of
self-control." This is the age of preventive medicine, why not also of
preventive crime and delinquency? Instead of confining our practise to
punishing offenders, necessary as this may be under the present
conditions, why not strive more to prevent the commission of offenses? As
far as normal individuals are concerned much can be done by early
cultivation in self-discipline and through the establishment of moral
backbone by training in the overcoming of difficulties. Much, very much,
also remains to be done in the correction of wrong social conditions.
=Unpardonable to Permit Delinquent Defectives to Multiply Their Kind.--=As
for our mental defectives and moral imbeciles, knowing now how strongly
hereditary the underlying factors of these conditions are, and with no
preventive or curative agents in sight, to let them produce progeny, is
clearly unpardonable.