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The proposal of a law in Pennsylvania providing for the asexualization of imbeciles and idiots who are dependent inmates of a state institution, brought out a vigorous protest from Alexander Johnson, an authority on the care of the feeble-minded. Mr. Johnson urges the sanctity of the individual human being and argues that, if sterilized, the most powerful incentive to their proper care would be removed. Segregation, he thinks, the better way: --

"It has far wider possibilities than the way of surgery since it may be applied, as that could not or at present would not be, to the many cases on the border line between imbecility and normality, for it is not necessarily final in any case. And it is precisely the borderline cases, as every institution man knows, for whom, if for any, surgery might be desirable. Besides segregation will still be necessary, no matter how much the knife may be used. It is only by the chloroform method that we may escape the burden of the care of these men and women children, the idiots and the imbeciles. So that method would be the next logical step." (27)

Whenever, as in the cases cited, it appears that these operations can be performed with benefit to the individual, public opinion will doubtless sanction them; and the result of such experimentation may ultimately be to extend their use very widely in the treatment of the diseased and criminal classes. To argue for the introduction of such methods on grounds of social selfishness will not be the best way to hasten their introduction.

Pending such experimentation, the sterilizing of the essentially unfit who may be dependents seems likely to be carried forward by the humaner methods of sequestration and of custodial care through life. The permanent isolation of the essentially unfit has commended itself to men as different as Ruskin and General Booth, and already the movement to establish these philanthropic monasteries and nunneries for the feeble-minded is becoming the substitute for natural selection. The prevention of the marriage of the unfit, the sterilization of criminals, and the custodial care of the imbecile are initial steps in prevention -- that the unfit may cease to be produced and to produce. As Cummings puts it: from him that hath not shall be taken away the power of degrading himself and society. Certain it is, that while charity may not cease to shield the children of misfortune, it must, to an ever increasing extent, reckon with the laws of heredity, and do what it can to check the spreading curse of race deterioration. The desire to prevent suffering must extend to the desire to prevent the suffering of unborn generations.

CHAPTER II.
CAUSES OF POVERTY.

The combined result of the rise of humanitarianism, the science of political economy, and the evolutionary theory, was a new interest in the causes of dependence. Neither philosophers nor charity workers were satisfied to accept any longer the misused dictum, "The poor ye have always with you," as an excuse for merely palliative measures in dealing with them, nor with the current explanations of their misery. The students of the social sciences who have sought to ascertain the causes of poverty have employed three tolerably distinct methods. First, there are those deductive or philosophical thinkers who, from the well-known facts of social organization, have sought to deduce the causes tending to poverty, as a systematic writer on pathology seeks to set forth the inherent characteristics of the bodily organism which tend to make disease likely or inevitable. Secondly, there are those who make an inductive study of concrete masses of pauperism, usually separating the mass into its individual units, seeking to ascertain in a large number of particular cases what causes have operated to bring about destitution. This work resembles that of the practising physician, endeavoring to ascertain the causes of sickness by a careful diagnosis of the cases under his care. Thirdly, there are those who study the classes not yet pauperized, to determine by induction what forces are tending to crowd individuals downward across the pauper line, as the health officer of a city might undertake, by an examination of the drainage system or an analysis of the water or food supply, to ascertain the causes of disease in a given locality.

Examples of the philosophical or deductive method are found in the writings of men like Malthus, or Karl Marx, or Henry George, who, while they describe actual conditions at great length, still make the philosophical reasoning which is the heart of their work antecedent to their facts. Their facts are given by way of illustration rather than of proof. Writers of this class are prone to think that they can find some single underlying cause of all the misery and destitution that exist. The three names just mentioned recall three explanations of poverty, each alleged to be universal, and the three mutually exclusive. Malthus was too wise a man to put forth his principle of population as an all-sufficient explanation of distress; but his followers have not been so wise. In the writings of certain economists it has been a fundamental thought that poverty exists mainly, if not entirely, because population tends to increase faster than food supply. All other causes are held to contribute to this, or to be derived from this. The pressure of population against the means of subsistence is held to guarantee that there shall always be a vast number of persons who can just manage to live miserably. A rise of wages will promote early marriages and rapid increase among laborers, until population is again checked by overcrowding and consequent misery and death. So wise a man as John Stuart Mill allowed his economic philosophy to be overshadowed by this idea.