Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/412

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406
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

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

Table X.
Correlation of Birth Rate Measured on Wives of Reproductive Ages with Social and Physical Characters of Population of London
For 1901 Census. David Heron
Birth Rate
Characters Correlated Correlation
Coefficient
With males engaged in professions .78
With female domestics per 100 females .80
With female domestics per 100 families .76
With general laborers per 1,000 males +.52
With pawnbrokers and general dealers per 1,000 males +.62
With children employed, ages 10-14 +.66
With persons living more than 2 in a room +.70
With infants under 1 year dying per 1,000 births +.50
With death from phthisis per 100,000 +.59
With total number of paupers per 1,000 +.20
With number of lunatic paupers per 1,000 +.34
Infant Mortality
With children aged 2-4 +.59
""5-14 +.54
""13-15 +.34
(per 100 wives)
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