66 THE FAMILY AND THE NATION 



evil-minded person they meet. There is also often 

 a definitely immoral tendency, which shows itself at a 

 very early age, and is borne witness to by parents and 

 school-teachers. The existing provisions for dealing with 

 girls of this class are hopelessly inadequate ; they are 

 "ins-and-outs" of the workhouse maternity wards. 

 Some thirty per cent of them are considered too bad 

 to keep even in Penitentiaries ; they lower the standard 

 of discipline and work, and, by reason of their wander- 

 ing, vacant minds, they cannot be persuaded without 

 compulsion to carry on remunerative employment. So 

 they go back to the streets to increase and perpetuate 

 the race of the feeble-minded. 



The Commissioners did not consider that they were 

 empowered to conduct a scientific inquiry into the 

 causation of mental defect ; but, in the course of their 

 investigations, a mass of evidence on this point ac- 

 cumulated. Twenty-five out of thirty-five witnesses 

 attached supreme importance to a history of mental 

 defect in the parents or near ancestors, and the general 

 opinion was that there is no such thing as manufactured 

 feeble - minded ness, apart from very rare accidental 

 injuries. In fact, as we should suspect, mental defect 

 dating from birth or observed in the early years of 

 childhood, is declared to be spontaneous originally, by 

 which is meant " not induced by external conditions," 

 and afterwards truly hereditary. The various forms 

 of mental defect, whether imbecility, drunkenness, 

 crime, immorality, are not primarily separate subjects 

 for investigation and treatment, but merely accidental 

 concomitants of a diseased pathological condition. 



