Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders | Page 5

sexual offences, but it is very far from correct to suppose that all
feeble-minded persons are sexual offenders, or that all sexual offenders are mentally
defective. On the contrary, among sexual offenders of the worst type, those convicted of
unnatural offences, are occasionally found to be persons possessing intellectual and
artistic powers above the average. There is something wrong in their mental, moral, and
emotional balance, as will be pointed out in the proper place, but, as a rule, it is not the
"intelligence quotient" which is at fault.



PART II.--PROBLEM OF THE FEEBLE-MINDED.
SECTION 1.--A MENACE TO MODERN CIVILIZATION.
The Committee are of opinion that the unrestricted multiplication of feeble-minded
members of the community is a most serious menace to the future welfare and happiness
of the Dominion, and it is of the utmost importance that some means of meeting the peril

should be adopted without delay. The position is the more serious because, while the
feeble-minded are extraordinarily prolific, there is a growing tendency among the more
intellectual classes for the birth-rate to become restricted.
An American writer, Lothrop Stoddart, in his striking book entitled "Revolt against
Civilization," expresses the fear that the very foundations of civilization are being
undermined. He finds reasons for great pessimism as regards the future in the results of
the intelligence tests taken in the American Army during the war.
The American War Department made psychological tests of 1,700,000 officers and men,
who were graded as follows:--
Grade. Percentage. Mental Age.
A 4½ 18-19 Very superior intelligence. B 9 16-17 Superior intelligence. C1 16½ 15
Average intelligence. (Rarely capable of finishing high-school course.) C-- 25 13-14 Low
average intelligence. D 15 11 Inferior intelligence. D-- 10 10 Very inferior intelligence.
Assuming that these 1,700,000 men are a fair sample of the entire population of
100,000,000 (and Stoddart says there is every reason to believe that it is a fair sample),
this means that the average mental age of Americans is only about fourteen; that
45,000,000, or nearly one-half of the whole population, will never develop mental
capacity beyond the stage represented by a normal twelve-year-old child; that only
13,500,000 will ever show superior intelligence; and that only 4,500,000 can be
considered "talented." "Still more alarming," the author continues, "is the prospect of the
future. The overwhelming weight of evidence indicates that the A and B elements in
America are barely reproducing themselves, while the other elements are increasing at
rates proportionate to their decreasing intellectual capacity; in other words, that
intelligence is to-day being steadily bred out of the American population."
The biologist Davenport calculated that at present rates of reproduction 1,000 Harvard
graduates of to-day would have only fifty descendants two centuries hence, whereas
1,000 Roumanians to-day in Boston, at their present rate of breeding, would have
100,000 descendants in the same space of time.
Mr. Lothrop Stoddart emphatically scouts the view which is occasionally put forward to
the effect that genius is a form of insanity, and that therefore one ought to be careful
about discouraging the marriage even of epileptics and mentally unbalanced persons for
fear a possible Napoleon or Julius Cæsar or Beethoven should be lost to the world.
"Careful scientific investigation," he says, "has clearly disproved this notion. For one
thing, elaborate statistical studies of eminent persons have shown them to be less liable to
insanity than the general population. Of course, a considerable number of eminent men
can be listed who unquestionably suffered from various neuropathic traits. But it was not
those traits that made them eminent; on the contrary, these were handicaps. Somewhere
back in their ancestry a taint was introduced into a sound superior strain, and produced
this disharmonic combination of qualities."
SECTION 2.--HEREDITY V. ENVIRONMENT.

The Committee feel bound to refer to the great strides made during the last half-century
towards establishing laws and theories of genetics and heredity. Unfortunately, terms
such as the "integrity of the germ plasm" and "the Mendelian law," while marking great
advances in biological thought and science, have become too much associated in the
public mind with a depressing and fatalistic notion that heredity determines everything
and that environment can play but a very insignificant part in human evolution,
development, and progress--physical, mental, or moral. Such, of course, is not the case.
In ultimate origin all evolution and all heredity are the outcome, summation, and
expression of the effects of environmental influences, acting on the whole organism
under certain laws of transmission. The laws of heredity, though as yet only partially
determined, are already sufficiently ascertained to prove for practical purposes that, in
order to promote integration and further progress in human evolution--not disintegration
and degeneration--two things are essential and complementary. On the one hand, we must
do everything possible in the direction of improving the nutrition, health,