420 Life and Letters of Francis Galton 



"An important Committee of this Council is charged with the care of those who fail to pass 

 the Poll examination in Eugenics. Such persons are undesirable as individuals, and dangerous 

 to the community, owing to the practical certainty that they will propagate their kind if 

 unchecked. They are subjected to surveillance and annoyance if they refuse to emigrate. Con- 

 siderable facilities are afforded to tempt them to go, and agents of the College who are settled 

 in the nearer towns to which they are most likely to drift, are prepared to take charge of them 

 on their arrival. Their passage out is paid, small sums are granted to them at first, on the 

 condition of their never returning to Kantsaywhere. They must renounce in writing all its 

 privileges before being allowed the cost of deportation. Not a few of these persons do well 

 enough especially when the principal reason of their rejection is some hereditary taint, and not 

 personal feebleness. As regards the insane and mentally defective, suitable places for their life 

 segregation are maintained in Kantsaywhere. With so small and eugenic a population, the 

 cases are few and easily dealt with. 



" The Regulations printed in the Calendar confirmed the view I had already formed, that 

 the propagation of children by the Unfit is looked upon by the inhabitants of Kantsaywhere 

 as a crime to the State. The people are not misled by the specious argument that there is no 

 certainty whether the anticipations of their unfitness will be verified in any particular case 

 and the individual risk may be faced. They look on the community as a whole and know the 

 results of unfit marriages with statistical certainty, which differs little from absolute certainty 

 whenever large numbers are concerned. For instance, they say 1000 unfit couples will assuredly 

 produce a number of children that can be specified within narrow limits, of each grade of 

 unfitness, though they cannot foretell whether these children will be the offspring of A, B, C 

 or X. This same statistical certainty forms a large part of the foundation of laws and penalties 

 in every part of the world. There are many grades of expected unfitness, ranging from that of 

 the offspring of the idiots, the insane and the feeble-minded, at the lower end of the scale of 

 civic worth, to whom the propagation of offspring is peremptorily forbidden, whether it be by 

 forcible segregation or other strong measures, up to the moderate unfitness expected in the 

 offspring of parents who rank only a little below the average in eugenic worth. The methods 

 of penalizing, taken in the order of their severity, are social disapprobation, fine, excommuni- 

 cation as by boycott, deportation, and life-long segregation. The degree of restriction varies 

 from the limitation of the offspring of unfit parents to a small number, up to its total 

 prohibition. They say that limitation of families is now a recognised institution among most 

 of the cultured and many of the artisan and labouring classes in Europe and America, and 

 there is no reason why a sentence demanding it for the protection of the nation should not be 

 passed, and the infraction of that sentence punished as a criminal act. As regards fines, if the 

 defaulter cannot pay tliem, he is treated with severity as a bankrupt debtor to the State, 

 being placed in a Labour Colony with hard work and hard fare until it is considered that he 

 has purged his debt. With so small a population as the 10,000 of Kantsaywhere, and with the 

 general high level of breed of its inhabitants, the cases of marked unfitness are not sufficiently 

 numerous to require formal classification in different asylums. They can be more or less 

 individually dealt with by the Board of Penalties. 



"The difficulty must again be discussed here, relating to the introduction of unfit immigrants. 

 Municipal laws have been enacted, that are quite as severe as those in America and elsewhere, 

 to exclude impecunious immigrants, but they are enacted here for the purpose of excluding 

 the immigration of the constitutionally unfit into Kantsaywhere. Ships, as already mentioned, 

 are only allowed to disembark their passengers subject to the fulfilment of certain accepted con- 

 ditions. If unfulfilled, the ship-owners are obliged to convey them back to whence they came. 

 Registered medical men are established at the principal ports from which immigrants arrive, 

 whose certificate that a person has passed the ordinary test for fitness in body and mind is 

 accepted. It exempts them from the somewhat more severe and tedious examination of which 

 I have already spoken, which is conducted in a building attached to the Custom House and 

 must be successfully gone through before they are allowed to disembark even for a short 

 residence. They are required later on to -pass the Poll examination which allows them to 

 become citizens of Kantsaywhere. 



"The grades of unfitness on the part of those who are married are determined by the number 

 of their joint marks. Immigrant parents both of whom have received positive marks at the 

 Poll examination may keep their children with them, but not otherwise. 



