114 THE CONTROL OF LIFE 



/ 

 the Stage of New York, he was struck by finding prisoners 



under four family names who were blood relations in 

 some degree. He set to work to discover the hereditary 

 relations and the nurture of these unfortunate people, 

 and was able to study 709 persons, 540 being Juke blood, 

 and 169 of ' X ' blood who had married into the Juke 

 family. He found that there had been 140 criminals 

 and offenders, 60 habitual thieves, and so on, the degener- 

 ate lot of them costing the State in three-quarters of a 

 century (beginning with 1800) over a million dollars. 

 Mr. Dugdale was a careful thinker, and what his book, 

 published in 1877, really showed was that given a bad 

 hereditary nature and a bad environmental nurture, 

 there will be a multipHcation of criminality, harlotry, 

 and pauperism. 



It should be noted, if it is not too obvious, that the 

 name Juke was fictitious, and that the names of places 

 were not given, so that the publication of The Jukes 

 did not bring about a result like that which follows 

 giving a dog a bad name. Not that this factor of social 

 branding can ever be eliminated. The chance discovery 

 (in 1811) of Mr. Dugdale's original manuscript made it 

 possible for Dr. Estabrook to bring the dismal story 

 of the Jukes down to 1915 ; and the sequel is not less 

 instructive than the book itself. 



Starting with five Juke sisters, the investigator has 

 found out a good deal about 2,094 people, of whom 

 1,258 were living in 1915. To about a half of the 

 total the somewhat vague term "feeble-minded" is 

 applied ; the history of the other half seems to have 



