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

By Robert Sloss

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Recently interest was sharply awakened by the rediscovery of the original Dugdale charts, mislaid for more than thirty years. The search that unearthed them was made at the instigation of the Carnegie Institute. As the charts contain true names of the families investigated by Dugdale, the institute hopes to trace them down to date and show how much more this one feeble-minded stock has cost a State during the past forty years.

Meanwhile a professor of the University of Berne, Switzerland, has traced the heredity of a family descended from a woman who for almost the entire latter half of the eighteenth century had been "a thief, a drunkard, a tramp." Of her 834 descendants 707 have been traced from youth to old age. Of these, 106 were born out of wedlock, 142 were beggars, and 64 more lived on charity. Among the women 181 lived loose lives. There have been 76 convicts in the family and 7 murderers. And this stock also has cost its government during seventy-five years no less than $1,250,000.

There is more evidence, but the need of the moment is not more evidence, but more enlightened public spirit. Many still look upon the village drunkard, the village idiot, the half-witted bound girl, with indulgent tolerance. If the reader wishes to understand what a menace to society all these are, let him read R. L. Dugdale's thin little volume, The Jukes.

Had that book been read, as it could have been, by the good folks in New Jersey that interested themselves in the woman above mentioned, and had they known of her feeble-minded ancestry, they might have avoided the mistake of marrying her to two feebleminded husbands in order to legitimatize the seven of her feeble-minded children that are still at large. They might, perhaps, have seen the tremendous significance of the fact that the birth-rate among the feeble-minded is twice as rapid as among normal persons. The tainted blood of the single degenerate ancestor of the Jukes during seventy-five years ramified into forty-five branches and produced nearly a thousand defectives and delinquents that became charges upon society.

A striking modern instance of this was discovered during the investigation of the heredity of feeble-minded twin boys now in the training-school at Vineland. Their father was found to be of good family. His four sisters, one his twin, were all normal. Being the only surviving boy, he himself had been thoroughly spoiled in his bringing up, and toward maturity he took to drinking and began to degenerate. He married first a normal woman and they had two normal children; for his second wife he took a feeble-minded woman out of the poorhouse. For a time his superior ancestry predominated. Her first child was normal; her second died in infancy; her third was normal; but her fourth was feeble-minded. The man had by this time sunk so low that for his third wife he chose a prostitute. She already had three feeble-minded illegitimate children, and she bore him three more of the same strain, two of whom are the twins at Vineland. It was subsequently discovered that this mother came of a feeble-minded stock of which 319 members have been investigated. Only 42 of them were found normal and 119 are feeble-minded.

With such examples, and there are many of them, showing the down-dragging effect of miscegenation with the feeble-minded, there remains to-day no slightest excuse for the folly of mingling defectives with normal persons in our almshouses, our reformatories, and, worst of all, in our public schools. The advantages of segregation of the abnormal classes, of which the feeble-minded are the most familiar, are obvious, and the specialists are calling loudly for institutions in which to put them. Still more loudly are they calling attention to the fact that a large proportion of these abnormals may have their condition ameliorated by education, provided they are caught young enough.

For this purpose education in the public schools is worse than useless. You may think you are perfectly competent to detect a feeble-minded child. Probably you are, if he or she presents an aggravated case of this malady. There remains what the specialists call " borderland" states, where the subject, because of some hereditary taint, slight, perhaps, or even because of some unfavorable environment, is on the verge of habits that, unless strongly counteracted by a special environment and training, will result at maturity in a condition permanently inimical to society.

Even medical inspection as at present constituted in our public schools is inadequate to detect and remedy these borderland states. Consider the case of Albert. He is a large, strong boy of seventeen. His physical development is about normal for his age. He talks fluently, reads well, and writes a good, flowing business hand. In a good many business houses it would be rather easy for Albert to get a position on the ordinary tests that are applied to youths. But he could not keep it. He had been through the seventh grade in the Philadelphia public schools, and his teachers considered him ready to be promoted to the eighth grade. He uses large words and many of them. He talks about nouns and phrases and that sort of thing. But his parents noticed that, at the age of seventeen, Albert did not know enough to take care of himself when alone in the city, and they sent him to the training-school at Vineland, where he came very near passing all the tests of mentality given him till he came to that of the Binet form-board. This consists in placing certain formed pegs in the holes which fit them. A boy of Albert's age should have done it the first time in about fifteen seconds. It took him forty-eight seconds, and he gave himself away badly by repeatedly trying the oval peg in the oblong hole, the square in the hole for the cross, and the diamond in the hole for the triangle. This test shows more quickly than any other the mental status of a child, and, all things considered, the training-school was obliged to put down seventeen-year-old Albert as of a mental status of nine years.

Albert is but one of many exemplars of the borderland states that still puzzle specialists. "We do not know half enough about this borderland business yet," said Dr. George M. Parker, Medical Examiner of the New York State Prison Association, " but if we knew it all and could immediately get passed laws enabling us to commit to institutions both adult and infant abnormals, we would have no proper institutions ready to receive them. Dr. Henry H. Goddard, of the Vineland school, who is doing research work along this line, in the United States, estimates that sixty-five per cent. of those with a feeble-minded heredity prove ineducable.