Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders | Page 6

proportion will become a burden on the State; and that if one such person is mated with a healthy individual an undue proportion of their children are likely to prove degenerate or defective, and the unsoundness will continue to make its appearance in succeeding generations.
While local evidence confirmatory of this came before the Committee, first place will be given to certain classic and exhaustive investigations and life-histories of degenerate families, going back many generations, such as no young country could possibly supply. However, the forcible and far-sighted report of the late Dr. Duncan Macgregor (originally Professor of Mental Science at Otago University, and subsequently Inspector-General of Asylums, Hospitals, and Charitable Aid), quoted in the Appendix, shows clearly that some very degenerate stocks imported into this country under the active immigration policy of the "seventies" and "eighties" were already threatening, thirty-five years ago, to become a serious tax on the country, as well as tending to lower the high physical, mental, and moral standard established by the original pioneers and settlers.
We shall now revert for the moment to the environmental factor. The first most pressing and immediate practical duty of the Government and the community is to spare no pains to improve the status and environment of the family so as to promote the highest attainable standard of physical, mental, and moral health for the new generation--already in our midst or bound to arrive in the course of the next few years.
It is becoming more and more widely recognized that by due attention to the pre-natal and post-natal care of mother and child an infinity of good can be done--indeed, a great deal is already under way in this direction throughout the Dominion. But the Committee are satisfied that much more ought to be done to ensure for children of the pre-school and school ages more generally favourable home conditions, and healthier environment and habits outside the home.
In the meantime it is obvious that very little can be effected in the way of bettering the average heredity; but are we taking adequate measures in the direction of improving the environment of mother and child? The housing problem is still far from satisfactory; help in the home can scarcely be procured, and the rearing and care of children throughout the pre-school and school periods, in a large proportion of cases, is neither conducive to a high standard of nutrition, growth, and moral development, nor to the establishment of normal self-control, especially as regards sexual habits and manifestations. The Committee cannot ignore the fact that the leading medical and psychological authorities lay it down as an axiom that the power of self-control is at its highest when the individual is physically active, well-nourished, and in perfect bodily health, and that impaired control always accompanies impaired nutrition, debility, and disease. It has been said, with profound wisdom and insight, that ultimately and fundamentally reproduction should be regarded as essentially "an exuberant phase of nutrition"; and there is no escaping the wide implication of Schiller's aphorism that "Love and Hunger rule the World."
In view of these considerations the Committee feel compelled to refer to such serious handicaps to all-round health, control, and efficiency as the prevalence of wrong feeding habits--e.g., giving children food between meals and the insufficient provision of fresh fruit and vegetables in the daily diet and the abuse of sweets. Other prominent and avoidable handicaps, seriously affecting many children throughout the Dominion, which ought to receive more serious attention are insufficiency of sunlight and fresh air in the home and at school, insufficient daily outing and exercise, lack of adequate provision in the way of playgrounds and swimming-baths, and last, but not least, the highly injurious practice of frequenting "picture-shows."
As the Committee are called on to deal specially with the problem of increasing manifestations of sexual depravity they cannot pass by the fact that in the course of the last twenty years the younger members of the community have been spending a steadily increasing proportion of their time, during the most impressionable period of life, in what are liable to prove forcing-houses of sexual precocity and criminal tendencies. There is every reason for regarding the habit of "going to the pictures" without adequate restrictions as contributing seriously to precocious sexuality, and also to weakening the powers of inhibition and self-control in other directions--powers which are the distinctive attributes of the higher human being.
Alongside these considerations, the bodily harm done to the young by frequently spending their afternoons and evenings in hot, stuffy, overcrowded halls shrinks into insignificance, though serious enough in itself.
The Committee endorses the opinions expressed by Education authorities, and by practically every organization throughout the Dominion concerned with the welfare of children, upon the harmful effect of moving-picture shows as at present conducted. The Committee sympathizes with proposals for reform