Nov. 15. 1911 



®W[P DBODOD 



A. I. Root. 



And I will make thee exceeding fruitful, and I 

 will make nations of thee, and kings shall come out 

 of thee.— Gen. 17 :6. 



My Home paper for August 15, as a mat- 

 ter of course, elicited a great amount of dis- 

 cussion. There were many encouraging 

 words in regard to it, and also some severe 

 protests at the course I there outlined. One 

 good friend went so far as to say that my 

 doctrine, if carried out, would eventually 

 kill off all the world except A. I. Boot and 

 his family. When dictating the article it 

 occurred to me that some might be unkind 

 enough to put some such construction upon 

 it; but God knows, and the most of my read- 

 ers know, I am sure, that my aim has been 

 to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and him only, 

 and most certainly not the poor stumbling 

 and blundering individual who stands in 

 my shoes. The objections to that Home 

 paper were mostly written with a leadpen- 

 cil, with poor spelling, and other indications 

 that the writers w-ere not very well informed 

 as to what is going on throughout our great 

 nation. The encouraging words came al- 

 most invariably from well-informed Chris- 

 tian people and friends of humanity. I have 

 room for only one which I give below: 



Mi: a. I. Root:— I want to cheer you on the arti- 

 cle on degenerates. The noted Harry Thaw left a 

 wake of ruined mechanics' daughters at Pittsburg. 

 and it is now being sought to give him another 

 chance to cause heartaches. Such a law as you 

 plead for, I have been advocating for many years. 

 I would go one step further than you, and apply it 

 as a punishment for seduction and habitual va- 

 grancy. Had we a law in the South giving such a 

 punishment for vagrancy there would be fewer idle 

 louts fed by the stealings from the whites' tables; 

 and by limiting the propagating of the race to the 

 industrious, the uplift would not be so discourag- 

 ing. 



Again, the greatest evil in the saloon was the 

 wine-room, and that has been merely transferred 

 to the soft-drink stand with its half-secluded nooks 

 and its waiters, often mere boys, having access to 

 the most dangerous of drugs. A judge of the Court 

 of Criminal Correction in St. Louis told me he be- 

 lieved more girls were being ruined in the "par- 

 lors " than ever were in the wine-rooras. 



I have noted with pleasure the good work in 

 Ohio, and should like to see it spread. In this State 

 and Mississippi the law seems largely used as a 

 means of graft. It is almost a rule that the night 

 police in the dry cities make bootlegging a part of 

 their income. 



Well, may a better day be ahead of us. May we 

 be able to overcome the greater wrongs, those 

 which ruin the youth, destroy the home, and will 

 eventually ruin the nation. 



Nashville, Ark., Aug. l!i. A. M. \'anAuken. 



In that August paper I had in mind the 

 "Jukes family," but I did not have any 

 particulars then at hand. Since then a kind 

 friend has handed me several pages from 

 Pierson's Magazine for November, 1909, 

 containing an article headed "Hereditary 

 Criminals," written by Judge Warren W.- 

 Foster, Senior Judge of the Court of General 

 Sessions of the Peace of the County of New 

 York. The vast criminal administration of 

 New York falls chiefly to this court, and no 

 man in America knows criminals better 

 than does Judge Foster. I make a few ex- 

 tracts from his article as follows: 



Two of his sons married two out of five, more or 

 less, illegitimate sisters. These sisters were the 

 "Jukes.'' The descendants of these five sisters 

 have been carefully traced through five subsequent 

 generations, the number of individuals thus traced 

 being 709. The real ageregate of this progeny is 

 probably 1200. This family, while it has included a 

 certain portion of honest workers, has been, on the 

 whole, a family of criminals and prostitutes, of 

 vagabonds and paupers. Not 20 of the men were 

 skilled workers: and of these, 10 learned their trade 

 in prison, while 180 received outdoor relief to the 

 extent of an aggregate of SOO years. Of the 709 there 

 were 76 criminals, of the females more than half 

 were prostitutes '52.40 per cent: the normal average 

 has been estimated at l.(i(iper cent), and the learn- 

 ed author estimates that, during this period, the 

 " Jukes "' family cost the State a million and a 

 quarter of dollars, without taking into considera- 

 tion the awful legacy of crime and criminals which 

 they also left behind them. Nothing more instruc- 

 tive in criminal heredity has been published as the 

 history of " The Jukes." 



In connection with the above I also quote 

 the following: 



The question of heredity has been further reduced 

 to cold statistics by Professor Poellmann. of the 

 University of Bonn, in his investigation of the de- 

 scendants of a confirmed female drunkard who 

 died early in the nineteenth century. The fifth or 

 sixth generation of her posterity numbered 8:34 

 persons, of these, the records of 709 have been as- 

 certained, and, of them, 107 were of illegitimate 

 birth, 162 were professional beggars. 64 were inmates 

 of almshouses, 181 were prostitutes. 76 were convict- 

 ed of serious crimes, and 7 were condemned for 

 murder. The total cost to the state of caring for 

 this woman's pauper offspring and punishing her 

 criminal progeny, together with the amount pri- 

 vately given in alms and loss through theft, was 

 reckoned at Sl.206,000, or more than S12,000 a year. 

 This expense has continued and increased, in al- 

 most geometrical progression, even unto this day, 

 for the fecundity of the irresponsible is notorious, 

 perhaps because of their irresponsibility. To them 

 children appear to be rather an asset than a liabil- 

 ity, if. indeed, they ever give the subject thought. 



A further proof of the potency of heredity is shown 

 by the investigations of the Kev. Dr. Stocker. of 

 Berlin. He traced 834 descendants of two sisters 

 who died in 1825, and found among them 76 who 

 had served 116 years in prisons, 164 prostitutes, 106 

 illegitimate children, 17 pimps, 142 beggars, and 64 

 paupers. 



.Statistics appear to show that Great Britain is, as 

 compared with the other countries of Europe and 

 the rest of the world as well, relatively free from 

 crime, and this comparative freedom has been ex- 

 plained by foreign experts as due to the former fre- 

 quency of hangings and to the ruthless transporta- 

 tion out of Europe of all convicted of heinous of- 

 fences, thus eliminating very largely the crimmal 

 classes, and putting a stop to the further breeding 

 of criminals by convicts on home soil. It will be 

 remembered that in the eighteenth century, under 

 the English law. there were over one hundred and 

 fifty dififerent offenses for which the penalty of 

 death was ordained by statute. Students of crim- 

 inologv. investigating further, have discovered that 

 in New South Wales, Tasmania, and Western Aus- 

 tralia, the penal colonies to which Great Britain 

 transferred her criminals, there is more criminality 

 than in the other ("free"i Australian colonies. 

 These sober facts of history thus seem to show that 

 the hereditary criminaliiy which would have in- 

 creased the crime of to-day in Great Britain, al- 

 ready greatly reduced by the wholesale hanging of 

 felons, has been larerely transferred to her penal 

 colonies. 



No doubt some of my readers will think 

 that I am dwelling unduly on the dark side 

 of humanity; in fact, I have had that feel- 

 ing myself, and my conscience has been 

 troubling me; but l'" rejoice and am glad " 

 to quote something on the other side from 



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