Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders | Page 5

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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 4? 18-19 Very superior intelligence. B 9 16-17 Superior intelligence. C1 16? 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 C?sar 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, conditions of life, and habits of the community; and, on the other hand, we must promote and encourage parenthood on the part of the best and stablest stocks, and do everything in our power to discourage, or in the extreme cases even to prevent, proliferation of unfit and degenerate strains.
For the purpose of the present inquiry we need merely state as a practical preliminary regarding heredity that it has been proved beyond question that if two feeble-minded persons marry they will most probably produce abundant offspring, of whom all may be subnormal, and a large
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