Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/412

406 which makes for bad nurture as well as bad nature seems to emphasize the birth rate.

As we have found conscientiousness is inherited, so I have little doubt that the criminal tendency descends in stocks. To-day we feed our criminals up, and we feed up the insane, we let both out of the prison or the asylum "reformed" or "cured" as the case may be, only after a few months to return to state supervision, leaving behind them the germs of a new generation of deteriorants. The average number of crimes due to the convicts in his majesty's prisons to-day is ten apiece. We can not reform the criminal, nor cure the insane

These last results show that the infantile mortality of the fertile classes does not compensate for their predominant fertility.

from the standpoint of heredity; the taint varies not with their moral or mental conduct. These are products of the somatic cells; the disease lies deeper in their germinal constitution. Education for the criminal, fresh air for the tuberculous, rest and food for the neurotic—these are excellent, they may bring control, sound lungs, and sanity to the individual; but they will not save the offspring from the need of like treatment, nor from the danger of collapse when the time of strain comes. They can not make a nation sound in mind and body, they merely screen degeneracy behind a throng of arrested degenerates. Our highly developed human sympathy will no longer allow us to watch the state purify itself by aid of crude natural selection. We see pain and suffering only to relieve it, without inquiry as to the moral character of the sufferer or as to his national or racial value. And this is right—no man is responsible for his own being; and nature and