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Page 38
With regard to the hereditary nature of Insanity, John Charles Bucknill
and Daniel Hack Tuke, M.D.'s, in "A Manual of Psychological Medicine,"
4th Ed., p. 65, says:--
"Certainly, if in ever so small degree there is to be a stamping out of
insanity, we must act on the principle, better let the individual suffer
than run the risk of bequeathing a legacy of insanity to the next
generation.... With regard to males, marriage would no doubt be highly
beneficial in many instances, _and if the risk of progeny is not run,
may well be encouraged_."
Esquirol, quoted by Bucknill and Tuke, p. 58, says:--"Of all diseases
Insanity is the most hereditary."
Bucknill and Tuke, p. 647, say:--
"Of marriage it may be said that the celibacy of the insane is the
prophylaxis of Insanity in the race, and although a well chosen mate and
a happy marriage may sometimes postpone or even prevent the development
of insanity in the individual, still no medical man, having regard to
the health of the community, or even of that of the family, can possibly
feel himself justified in recommending the marriage of any person of
either sex in whom the insane diathesis is well marked."
Again (pp. 647 and 648) "It is thus that the seeds of mental diseases
and of moral evils are sown broadcast through the land; and other new
defects and diseases are multiplied and varied with imbecilities, and
idiocies, and suicidal and other propensities and dispositions, leading
to all manner of vice and crime. The marriage of hereditary lunatics is
a veritable Pandora's box of physical and moral evil."
The least fit, then, are the most fertile, and the most fertile are
subject to the common law of heredity, and the defects are transmitted
to their offspring, often accentuated by the intermarriage which their
circumstances favour or even necessitate.
But this is not all. The least fit have the worst environment, and in
the worst possible surroundings the progeny of the unfit multiply and
develop. They are born into conditions, well described by Dr. Alice
Vicery, in a paper on "The food supplies of the next generation."
"Conditions in which the food, warmth, and clothing which are necessary
for the mere maintenance of the functions of the body in their normal
state, cannot be obtained; in which men, women, and children are forced
to crowd into dens wherein decency is abolished, and the most ordinary
conditions of healthful existence are impossible of attainment; in which
the pleasures within reach are reduced to bestiality and drunkenness; in
which the pains accumulate at compound interest in the shape of
starvation, disease, stunted development, and moral degradation in which
the prospect of even steady and honest industry is a life of
unsuccessful battling with hunger, rounded by a pauper's grave."
What possible hope can there be for the progeny of defectives born with
vicious, criminal, drunken or pauper tendencies, into an environment
whose whole influence from infancy to maturity tends to accentuate and
develop these inherited defects?
In this pitiable stratum of human society, vice and misery, as checks to
increase, reign supreme, but as no other check exists, fertility is at
its maximum, and keeps close up on the heels of the positive checks.
The State in her humanitarian sympathy, and in New Zealand it is
extravagant, puts forth every effort to improve the conditions of its
"submerged tenth." Insanitary conditions are improved, the rooms by law
enlarged, the air is sweetened, the water is purified, the homes are
drained. The delicate and diseased are taken to our hospitals, the deaf
and blind to our deaf-mute institutions, the deformed and the fatherless
to our orphan homes. And all are carefully nursed as tender precious
plants. They are snatched from Nature's clutch and reared as prize stock
are reared and kept in clover, till they can propagate their kind.
We feed and clothe the unfit, however unfit, and then encourage their
procreation, and as soon as they are matured we foster their fertility.
No want of human sympathy for the poor unfortunates of our race is in
these words expressed,--a statement simply of the inevitable
consequences of unscientific and anti-social methods of dealing with the
degenerate.
No State can afford to shut its eyes to the magnitude of this problem.
The procreation of the unfit must be faced and grappled with. And the
greater the decline in the birth-rate of our best stock, the more urgent
does the solution of the problem become. For is not the proportion of
the unfit to the fit yearly increasing!
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