Although the limits of this class must always vary with the advance of criminology and pathology, we can almost all agree as to the inclusion of certain individuals. Among the mentally unfit for parentage may be counted the insane, the feeble-minded, and the epileptic, leaving to the future the question of "backward" children. While the criminal classes mark roughly the boundaries of the morally unfit, political offenders must of course be excluded from the category, and we must not forget that many of our criminals are made, not born, and may represent valuable variations from type. Our laws in general would better follow the tendency seen in Ferri's positive school of criminology, and determine the treatment from the nature of the criminal rather than of the crime. Those malefactors who show no improvement under reformatory influences or the indeterminate sentence may surely be included, as also all those whose record displays an excessively anti-social nature, from the murderer to the habitual drunkard.
Any attempt to weed out the physically unfit must proceed still more carefully, for we are not yet competent to point out just who come under this classification. We may be tolerably sure as to those afflicted with syphilis and with congenital defects of the senses, among the latter being reckoned many cases of deafness. Schuster's[1] investigations give the high rate of.54 for parental and.73 for fraternal inheritance in deafmutism, and other statistics give the percentage of deaf among the children of deaf parents as eight per cent, as compared with one tenth per cent, in the population as a whole. As to all others action should be very conservative, since natural selection may be trusted to take care of mere weakness and susceptibility to special bacterial diseases. In any case, it is a long and tedious process to weed out a disease susceptibility from man. A certain consumptive stock, for example, may happen to be of high social value, and there is better prospect of conquering tuberculosis by medical means than by the severe processes of artificial selection.
The prohibition of marriage within certain degrees of consanguinity would doubtless assist these preventive measures materially and here a beginning was made many ages ago. As far back as the Mosaic law, we see certain degrees of consanguinity proscribed under severe penalties, and this eugenic regulation forms a part of every civilized code.
As the list of unfit must vary considerably with scientific advance, it is best for the present to agree on the obvious defectives just mentioned, to study human heredity with redoubled vigor, and to consider carefully the means by which this prevention of parenthood may be brought about.
- ↑ K. Pearson, "Scope and Importance to the State of the Science of National Eugenics," p. 28.
