Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/342

 330 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

is an essential factor in a rational view of life and the universe. In spite of the powerful and influential protest of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the civilized nations have gone on their way of extending the positive agencies of benevolence. The let-alone policy is impracticable. Evidence is accumulating to prove that charitable support without a positive general policy of segregation and custody is, in the case of those who are seriously defective, the certain cause of actually increasing misery by insuring the propa- gation of the miserable. We cannot go backward to mere natural selection, the process which was suitable with vegetable and ani- mal life, and inevitable in the stages of early human culture. Nor can we rest with merely mitigating methods of relief. We are compelled to consider devices for direct elimination of the heredity of pauperism and grave defect.

Fortunately we have already discovered that an effective colony method is technically and economically possible, humane, and financially advisable. For example, it is not difficult to esti- mate the average cost per year for the support of a feeble-minded woman of child-bearing age in a farm colony where all the inhabitants work, learn, play, but none breed. If she were free to roam, the county or state would have during these same years co support the woman and her defective illegitimate children. The future generations of "the Jukes family" are in sight, and the burdens they will bring. We know the effects of these two policies; they " spring to the eyes." The method of segregation, as a device of negative social selection, is already at work and its results are before us. Gradually, tentatively, carefully, the method will be employed with others, as they are found to be manifestly unfit for the function of propagation and education of offspring : from the insane and feeble-minded society will proceed to place in permanent custody the incurable inebriate, the profes- sional criminal, the hopelessly depraved. The marriage of con- sumptives, and of others with feeble constitutions, will be increas- ingly diminished under pressure of enlightened public opinion.

But the policy of segregation is applicable only within rigid limitations. Only those members can be cut off from family life and social freedom who are manifestly unfit for parenthood and