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The State And The Fool

Creator: Robert Sloss (author)
Date: February 3, 1912
Publication: Harper's Weekly
Source: Available at selected libraries

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A Problem that demands the immediate attention of society, not only on humane grounds, but as a business proposition

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By Robert Sloss

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In this article Mr. Sloss advocates the segregation of feeble-minded persons to prevent them from propagating their kind. The discovery that certain families of feeble-minded individuals hare produced criminals and offenders against society in every generation has led to the adoption of more radical measures in several States. But how would the genius fare -- the Poe or Pascal -- if all persons of abnormal mentality were placed in asylums? Would the State gain or lose by holding the threat of imprisonment as a perpetual menace over the heads of all who did not conform to the ways of the mediocre? The subject is one that cannot be decided offhand. This article presents the view of the believers in eugenics.

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In rural New Jersey, not long ago, a girl of seventeen came to do the housework of a worthy family. Her father was a drunken brute. Her mother was tuberculous, but had a degree of refinement. The girl had apparently inherited this refinement. She was also pretty. It was not long before the worthy family discharged her for good and sufficient cause, and she fled to the almshouse, where she gave birth to an illegitimate child.

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Good Samaritans subsequently gave her and her child a home in exchange for more housework. It soon became evident that her offense against society had been repeated. Her new employers were just people in the fear of God, and instead of casting her off they searched diligently and found the father of this second child. He proved to be a drunken epileptic of the neighborhood. Nevertheless, to free the child from the handicap of illegitimacy, the good people insisted that the pair should be married forthwith. They were, and in this wedlock a third child was born. Then this family of five obtained a home with an unmarried farmer in exchange for such work as they could do about his place.

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The benefactors of this young wife were beginning to feel that they had done very well by her when her fourth child was born. Her husband refused to acknowledge it. Again the good people interested themselves, and they managed to wring from the farmer the confession that the child was his. He was evidently fond of the mother, and her epileptic husband was strongly minded to put her away. The disagreeable situation seemed in a way providential to her good friends, as it enabled them to divorce the young woman from an undesirable husband and to remarry her to one who, though also somewhat feeble-minded, was both willing and able to support her and her progeny. This was accordingly done, and of this second union four more children were born.

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Perhaps the reader feels that this sordid tale might better not have come to light. It would not have done so had not the first illegitimate offspring of this woman found its way into the training-school at Vineland, New Jersey. Its pedigree was examined, and a further investigation disclosed the fact that every one of the mother's eight children was feeble-minded like herself, and that she had four feeble-minded brothers and sisters who, like herself, had inherited the taint from feeble-minded parents. All of them, like herself, were married and had children. Most remarkable of all, the mental condition of the mother has been traced back definitely to its source in a feeble-minded, alcoholic great-great-grandfather.

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Furthermore, in the training-school at Vineland there are upward of four hundred feeble-minded children, and the heredity of two-thirds of them has been traced back with similarly illuminating results. It is startling to find how very new is this form of research. Three-quarters of the nineteenth century had passed before anybody thought of it. Then R. I. Dugdale, in visiting jail's for the New York State Prison Association, noticed that in some localities prisoners with the same family name recurred with surprising frequency. Following this clue, he traced backward their lineage, and after some years of painstaking work he plotted a series of charts tracing all these criminals and many more to a single progenitor born between 1720 and 1740.

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In a modest volume Dugdale published the results of his investigation, showing that this one feeble-minded man's descendants had achieved an appalling record for crime, debauchery, and pauperism. Pauperism in this family was eight times as common as among the rest of the population, and in seventy-five years the delinquents and dependents belonging to this one degenerate stock had cost the State of New York $1,200,000.

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Such was the first significant hint of how advisable it is for a State to put the care of its feeble-minded upon a business basis. A voluminous literature upon the Dugdale discovery began to appear. But society is slow to apply the scientific method to itself. Dugdale's book went out of print. His charts were lost in the dusty archives of the New York State Prison Association. The nineteenth century waned away without a flicker of popular interest in the subject, to which he had made so momentous a contribution. The first decade of the twentieth century is gone, and intelligent agitation for a business-like attitude by the State in this matter is only just beginning.

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