A SOCIAL POLICY TOWARD DEPENDENTS 829 



innocent little children and helpless old men and women, unfortunate 

 and crippled veterans of the army of labor. We do not need to 

 depend on imagination for a knowledge of the effect of such conduct. 

 It is what Bill Sykes did, what miserly stepfathers and heartless 

 tyrants have done. The king who heard that his subjects had 

 nothing to eat, and sent word that they were welcome to eat grass, 

 was inviting a revolution -- and it came. Hunger breeds despair, 

 and those who are left on the verge of starvation have nothing to risk 

 when they steal and rob, or set the torch to palaces, and rob public 

 stores and granaries in the glare of conflagrations. 



The instinct of sympathy is too deep and general to permit neglect. 

 The moral obligation of charity is now with us organic, institutional, 

 and fortified by ethical philosophy. While we cannot " prove " it, 

 as we can a physical cause of disease, we can show to all who are 

 capable of appreciating the argument that charity 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 propagation of the miserable. We cannot go back- 

 ward to mere natural selection, the process which was suitable with 

 vegetable and animal 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 estimate 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 nrne breed. If she were free to roam, the county 

 or state would have during these same years to 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 consump- 



