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Page 28
The very poor includes amongst its numbers, the drunkard, the criminal,
the professional pauper, and the physically and mentally defective.
The drunkard is not distinguished by his prudence, nor by his
self-restraint. In fact the alcohol which he imbibes paralyses what
self-control he has, and excites through an increased circulation in his
lower brain-centres an unnatural sexual desire. What hope is there of
the drunkard curtailing his family by self-restraint?
Dr. Billings says, (Forum, June 1893) "So far as we have data with
regard to the use of intoxicating liquors, fertility seems greatest in
those countries and amongst those classes where they are most freely
used."
Neither is the criminal blessed with the important attributes of
prudence and self-control. They are conspicuous by their absence in him.
In all defectives, in epileptics, idiots, the physical deformed, the
insane, and the criminal, the prudence and self-restraint necessary to
the limitation of families is either partially or entirely absent.
To the poor in crowded localities, with limited room-space and
insanitary surroundings, effective self-restraint is more difficult than
in any other class of society.
In all defectives the sexual instinct is as strong, if not stronger,
than in the normal, and they have not that interest in life, and regard
for the future that suggest restraint, nor have they the power to
practise it though prudence were to guide them.
The higher checks to population, as they exist among the better classes
of people, do not obtain amongst the defectives taken as a class.
Vice and misery are more active checks amongst the very poor, and
abortion is practised to a very considerable extent, but the appalling
fact remains, that the birth-rate of the unfit goes on undisturbed,
while the introduction of higher checks amongst the normal classes has
led to a marked decline, more marked than at first sight appears. The
worst feature of the problem, however, is not so much the disproportion
in the numbers born to the normal and the abnormal respectively, but the
fact that the defectives propagate their kind.
The defectives, whose existence and whose liberty constitute the
greatest danger to the State, are the intermittent inhabitants of our
lunatic asylums, prisons, and reformatories.
There is one defect common to all these, and that is defective
inhibition.
All human activity is the result of two forces, motor impulses tending
to action, and inhibition tending to inertia.
The lower animals have strong motor impulses constantly exploding and
expressing themselves in great activity, offensive, defensive,
self-preservative, and procreative, being restrained only by the
inhibitive forces of their conditions and environment.
Children have strong motor impulses, which are at first little
controlled. Inhibition is a late development and is largely a result of
education.
If the motor impulses remain strong, or become stronger in the presence
of development with exercise, while inhibition remains weak, we have a
criminal.
Inhibition is the function performed by the highest and last-formed
brain-cells. These brain cells may be undeveloped either from want of
exercise, that is, education, or from hereditary weakness, or, having
been developed may have undergone degeneration, under the influence of
alcohol, or from hereditary or acquired disease.
Motor impulses, as the springs of action, are common to all animals. In
the lower animals inhibition is external, and never internal or
subjective. In man it may be internal or external.
It is internal or subjective in those whose higher brain centres are
well developed and normal. Their auto-inhibition is such that all their
motor impulses are controlled and directed in the best interests of
society.
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