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Page 36
The strong attractive force of one social stratum upon the next below,
excites in the latter a nervous tension which predisposes to a breakdown
in the face of some adversity.
The passion for ease and luxury, and the dread of poverty tend to
overstrain the nervous system, and numberless neurotic defectives fall
back upon society, and give themselves up to the propagation of their
kind.
Our charitable aid institutions tend largely to swell the numbers of the
great unfit.
Dr. MacGregor in one of his valuable and forcible reports upon our
charitable aid institutions, says:--
"Our lavish and indiscriminate outdoor relief, whose evils I am tired of
recapitulating,--our shameless abuse of the hospital system,--the
crowding of our asylums by people in their dotage, kept there because
there is no suitable place to send them to, and many of them sent by
friends anxious only to be relieved of the duty of supporting and caring
for them,--what is it all coming to?"...
"The practical outcome of our overlooking the continued accumulation of
degenerates among our people by our fostering of all kinds of weakness
will necessarily be, if it continues, that society will itself
degenerate. Taxation will increase by leaps and bounds, and the
industrious and self-respecting citizens will rebel, especially if
taxation is expected to meet all the demands of a legislature that puts
our humanitarian idea of justice in the place of charity."
It has already been urged that there is no evidence of any physiological
defect in any class of society interfering with fertility. Sexual
inhibition, from prudential motives is the real cause in New Zealand.
Sexual inhibition implies well-developed self-control, the very force in
which almost all defectives are most deficient, and the absence of which
makes them criminals, drunkards and paupers. In almost all defectives
too, prudence is conspicuous by its absence.
The only moral force we know of, that has curtailed, or will curtail,
the family within the limits of comfortable subsistence, is sexual
inhibition with prudence. But this force is absolutely impossible
amongst defectives.
It is not only a powerful force among the normal, but with us to-day it
is powerfully operative. Amongst the defectives it does not and cannot
exist.
Apart from observation and statistics, therefore, it can be shown that
the birth-rate amongst the unfit is undisturbed. They marry and are
given in marriage, free from all restraint save that of environment, and
worst of all they propagate their kind.
Dr. Clouston says (Clinical Lectures on Mental Diseases, 4th Ed., p.
330) "As we watch children grow up we see that some have the sense of
right and wrong, the conscience, developed much sooner and much stronger
than others; just as some have their eye teeth much sooner than others;
and looking at adults, we see that some never have much of this sense
developed at all. This is notoriously the case in some of those whose
ancestors for several generations have been criminals, insane or
drunkards." Again (p. 331) "We know that some of the children of many
generations of thieves take to stealing, as a young wild duck among tame
ones takes to hiding in holes, and that the children of savage races
cannot copy at once our ethics nor our power of controlling our actions.
It seems to take many generations to redevelop an atrophied conscience.
There is no doubt that an organic lawlessness is transmitted
hereditarily."
Mr. W. Bevan Lewis says (A text-book of Mental Disease, p. 203) "It is
also notable, that in a large proportion of cases, we find the history
of ancestral insanity attached to the grand-parents, or the collateral
line of uncles and aunts, significant of a more remote origin for the
neurosis. The actual proportion of cases revealing strongly-marked
hereditary features (often involving several members of the subject's
ancestry), amounts to 36 per cent;" while Mr. Briscoe declares (Journal
of Mental Science, Oct. 1896) that 90% of the insane have a heredity of
insanity.
The following table from Dr. MacGregor's reports gives an account of two
families in New Zealand and their Asylum history.
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