THE PROBLEM OF PAUPERISM 



143 



spring of the licentious. The parents have been 

 debilitated thereby, and their weakness is trans- 

 mitted to the children. Intemperance and licen- 

 tiousness often go together, and paupers are born 

 of such wedlock. Mr. Dugdale says again : 

 " Hereditary pauperism seems to be more fixed 

 than hereditary crime ; for very much of crime 

 is the misdirection of faculty, and is amenable 

 to discipline, while very much of pauperism is 

 due to the absence of vital power, the lines of 

 pauperism being, in many cases, identical with 

 the lines of organic disease of mind or body, as 

 insanity, consumption, syphilis, which cause, from 

 generation to generation, the successive extinction 

 of capacity till death supervenes." ^ I have found 

 nothing on this subject so concise and compre- 

 hensive as Mr. Dugdale's "Tentative Inductions 

 on Pauperism," which I quote as follows i^ — 



" I. Pauperism is an indication of weakness of 

 some kind, either youth, disease, old age, injury ; 

 or, for women, childbirth. 



"2. It is divisible into hereditary and induced 

 pauperism. 



"3. Hereditary pauperism rests chiefly upon 

 disease in some form, tends to terminate in ex- 



1 The Jukes, Dugdale, p. 50. 



2 Ibid. pp. 37, 38. 



