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Page 35
"The condition of disease, debility, and defective sight and hearing, in
the public elementary schools in poorer districts, is appalling. The
research of a recent Royal Commission has disclosed that of the children
in the public schools of Edinburgh, 70 per cent, are suffering from
disease of some kind, more than half from defective vision, nearly half
from defective hearing, and 30 per cent, from starvation. The physical
deterioration of the recruits who offer themselves for the army is a
subject of increasing concern. There are grounds for at least suspecting
a growing degeneracy of the population of the United Kingdom,
particularly in the great towns."
The following table gives the charges before Magistrates in our
Courts:--
Year. Proportion per thousand of
mean population.
1894 24.76
1897 26.87
1898 29.42
1899 29.48
1900 31.54
1901 33.20
1902 35.19
Now who are the unfit? Are they more fertile than the fit? and do they
propagate their kind?
The following defects constitute their victims members of that great
class of degenerates who are unfit to procreate healthy normal
offspring. Many of these conditions are partly congenital and partly
acquired, but in the majority of defectives a transmitted taint is
present.
I. Congenital defects:--
1. Idiocy.
2. Imbecility.
3. Criminal Taint.
4. Insanity.
5. Inebriate Taint.
6. Pauperism.
7. Deaf Mutism.
8. Epilepsy.
II. Acquired defects:--
1. Crime.
2. Insanity.
3. Epilepsy.
4. Inebrity.
5. Confirmed Pauperism.
With the exception of the very young and the very old, all members of
society, who have to be supported by others, constitute the unfit. Many
are supported by friends and relatives, but year by year, it is becoming
more noticeable, that the moral guardians of the unfit are shirking
their responsibility and handing their defective relatives over to the
State and demanding their gratuitous support as a right.
Dr. MacGregor, Inspector of Asylums and Hospitals, N.Z., in his report
for 1898, p. 5, says:--
"As if the State had a vested interest in the degradation of its people,
I find that they, as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, are
responding to our efforts to sap their self-respect by doing their
utmost to throw the cost of maintaining their relatives on the
ratepayers. I constantly hear the plea urged that as taxpayers and old
colonists they have a right to send their relatives to State
institutions."
Our social conditions manufacture defectives, and foster their
fertility. The strain and stress of modern competition excite an anxiety
and nervous tension under which many break down, and much of the
insanity that exists to-day is attributable to nervous strain in the
struggle of life.
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