154 HEREDITY AND SOCIETY 



We must now turn to the consideration of possible 

 future administrative and legislative action, and we 

 can best deal first with measures designed to check 

 directly the growth of undesirable elements in the 

 population. 



Our knowledge of the laws of heredity is not yet 

 complete enough to warrant drastic measures save in 

 the clearest cases. But two such cases, often indeed 

 merging into one, are ready for treatment. 



The first is the case of those suffering from mental 

 defects of known hereditary character. At present, 

 feeble-minded children are sent to special schools, 

 where they are trained at great expense on lines of 

 education practically the same as those of the ordinary 

 elementary schools. Save in a very few cases, they are 

 incapable of profiting by such training. Then, at the 

 critical age of sixteen, they are discharged from school. 

 They are unfit to protect themselves ; and the natural 

 result follows in early and constant visits to the work- 

 house, the prison, and the maternity wards of the 

 hospitals and infirmaries. They become a misery to 

 themselves, and a source of new generations of mentally 

 defective citizens. 



A Royal Commission has taken voluminous evidence 

 and issued a report in favour of compulsory care and 

 detention. Nothing stands in the way of reform save 

 the apathy of our legislators on a question where all 

 competent opinion is agreed, but which does not appeal 

 to the votes of the multitude, and the perversity of 

 some of our educationalists, who persist in thinking 

 that they can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. 



Nearly allied to this case is that of the habitual 



