THE FEEBLE-MINDED.
WITH some suddenness Parliament appears to have wakened up to the importance of dealing with the problem of the feeble-minded. It is now four years since a Royal Commission, after prolonged and careful inquiry, presented a report which was accepted by the large majority of persons who had studied the question as embodying the best methods of dealing with this problem. During those four years a Ministry has been in power which has made constant professions of its anxiety to deal with the social problems, and yet has consistently ignored this question, which admittedly lies at the root of an almost incalculable amount of poverty and crime. The reason, of course, is that the present Ministry is more concerned to advance Bills which please its own rabid partisans in the country than to deal with measures which are of national import- ance, and therefore excite no party spirit. Happily the question has been forced to the trent by the action of private members, with the result that Mr. McKenna has given to the Press the outline of a very important measure prepared in the Home Office.
So far as can be judged from this outline, the " Mental Deficiency Bill," as it is called, has been drafted both with skill and boldness. It does not shirk any phase of the problem except the very difficult question of the artificial sterilization of the unfit, to which we shall briefly refer later on. The Bill begins by setting up a central authority to deal with the feeble-minded. For reasons not clearly explained this authority is, for the present at any rate, to exist side by side with the Commis- sioners in Lunacy, although the Bill contemplates the amalgamation of the two bodies in the future. There certainly would have been great advantages in creating a single body for dealing with the whole problem, as was recommended by the Royal Commission. Apart from this defect the powers of the new body which it is proposed to create appear to be ample. It will have power to exercise general supervision and control over defectives, to co- ordinate the administration of local authorities, to inspect institutions for defectives, and to provide institutions for defectives of "criminal, dangerous, or violent propensities." For these purposes the new Commissioners are to receive an income from the Treasury of £150,000 per annum—a figure which, we are afraid, will have to be considerably increased in the future. The definition of the classes of persons who may be placed under the control of the Com- missioners is very wide, but appears to be carefully drawn. It includes defectives who are found wandering about, neglected, or being cruelly treated. It includes also habitual drunkards and those charged with the commission of any crime or undergoing imprisonment or detention in a reform- atory or industrial school. It includes children who at the age of sixteen have been discharged from one of the schools established for dealing with defective and epileptic children. Those are all straightforward points to which it is difficult to imagine that any one—even Mr. Josiah Wedgwood— can take exception. There is added, however, a category which may be regarded as a proof of the courage with which the Bill has been drafted, namely, those defectives " in whose case it is desirable in the interests of the com- munity that they should be deprived of the opportunity of procreating children." Here wo got to the very root of the problem. The only way of cutting off the constant stream of idiots and imbeciles and feeble-minded persons who help to fill our prisons and workhouses, reformatories, and asylums is to prevent those who are known to be mentally defective from producing offspring. Undoubtedly the best way of doing this, and in many cases the only possible way, is to place these defectives under control. Even if this were a hardship to the individual it would be necessary to inflict it for the sake of protecting the race, but in the vast majority of cases the feeble-minded person has none of that love of liberty which is the characteristic of the normal human being. On the contrary, there is nothing that most of these unfortunate creatures fear so much as being left to their own resources without some authoritative control over them. Therefore it is both a kindness to them as well as a necessity for the com- munity that they should be placed under restraint. As we hinted above, it has been sometimes suggested that mentally deficient persons should be artificially sterilized. In the vast majority of cases this probably -would not be an alternative to the policy of segregation, for most feeble-minded persons require restraintancl segregation on other grounds than their capacity to produce offspring. It is, however, possible that there may be some forms of mania—and notably sexual mania—which might be alle- viated, if not absolutely cured, by sterilization ; and in that event sterilization might be a conceivable alternative to segregation. The whole problem, however, is so obscure and has as yet been so little investigated that the Home Office is, we feel sure, wise to have refrained from including any reference to artificial sterilization in the present Bill. But while the Bill does not touch this very difficult question its authors have had the courage to draft a clause —No. 49—which makes it a criminal misdemeanour to marry with a congenitally defective person. The necessity for this clause lies in the fact that the Bill does not inter- fere with the feeble-minded who are cared for in their own homes. This, we think, is a necessary exception to the general control of the feeble-minded by the State. It would in most cases be unwarrantably cruel to take away a feeble-minded child from the custody of parents who are devoted to its care. But if the State permits, as it must permit, this liberty to exist, it is bound to protect future generations by preventing, as far as possible, the marriage of feeble-minded persons.
In some quarters there has been a tendency to sneer at this eugenic aspect of the problem, and we have been told that in the past the race has been able to take care of itself and may be trusted to do so in the future. It is perfectly true that in the past no attempt was made to prevent feeble-minded persons from procreating children, but it is equally true that very little effort was made to preserve the children so procreated from Nature's penalty. Two facts are now fairly well ascertained : first, that feeble-minded persons are exceptionally prolific; and secondly, that their offspring are exceptionally liable to early death. Thus Nature when left to herself tends to eliminate this bad stock. But in modern days we regard death, especially for the young, as such a terrible calamity that every effort is made, and rightly made, to keep alive every child born into the world, however tainted its body and mind may be. That is not the only point. In addition from a variety of causes the number of children born in the more cultivated and better-off families has greatly diminished. It is, in our opinion, a, serious evil that the output of children of the best stock is restricted, but the facts are unfortunately as stated. Thus on both sides, namely, the preservation of the lives of the unfit and the non-reproduction of the fit, the average quality of the race tends to suffer. This is the eugenic argument for the segregation of the feeble-minded, and it is an argument that cannot be disregarded and ought not to be minimized.
We have said enough to show that Mr. McICenna's Bill is a measure of tremendous importance. Not only will it open up new ground by, for the first time, introducing into our law provisions for the definite protection of the race against deterioration, but it will bring immediate relief to thousands of feeble-minded persons who are now suffering misery because there is no proper organization to deal with them. According to the Report of the Royal Commission there were on January 1st, 1906, in England and Wales alone 150,000 idiots, imbeciles, and feeble-minded persons and in addition about 120,000 persons suffering from some kind of insanity. In London alone no fewer than 800 children every year leave the protection of the special schools established for afflicted or defective children. As Mr. Holmes points out in his "London's Underworld," these children leave the protection of the schools "to live in the underworld of London just at the age when protection is most urgently needed. . . . These young people grow into manhood and womanhood without the possibility of growing in wisdom or skill. . . . Sooner or later the greater part of them become a costly burden upon the community and an eyesore to humanity." When they have reached this stage many of them are treated, not as if they were suffering from a disease which destroys mental capacity, but as if they wcra deliberate and male- volent criminals. Others are condemned to alternate between the life of the streets and the life of the work- house, buffeted about, cared for by no one. Instead, it is now proposed that the State should take care of all these derelicts of humanity and should place them in institu- tions where their peculiar needs can be properly provided for, and where they may enjoy under wise and kindly supervision something of the happiness of life while being prevented from adding to the world fresh lives like their own.
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