10 NATURE AND NURTURE 



the employment itself resulting from such women having 

 mentally and physically inferior husbands earning low 

 wages, you cannot profitably attempt to discuss such a 

 problem as the employment of women. Or, again, take 

 the problem of crime ; it has been asserted that crime is 

 associated with certain forms of the head, and certain 

 physical stigmata. Whole schools of criminology have 

 arisen based solely on such assertions, and yet up to the 

 present time no satisfactory treatment of crime is really 

 possible, because there has been no scientific.investigation 

 as to whether crime is correlated with any peculiar physical 

 or mental characters ; in reality nobody knows whether 

 crime is associated with general degeneracy, whether it 

 is a manifestation of certain hereditary qualities, or 

 whether it is a product of environment or tradition. 

 There is endless talk about crime and criminals, but 

 hardly any one of the so-called criminologists has really 

 worked on the only lines by which an adequate answer 

 could be obtained to a great national problem. Or, 

 again, let us take the problem of shortsightedness — an 

 evil which is possibly on the increase in this country, and 

 might become here as great a national detriment as it 

 is to some of our neighbours. Is it due to inheritance 

 and the modern cessation of that stringent selection in 

 vision on which primitive races so much depend, or is 

 it a product of living in towns with no distant horizon, 

 or is it due to home environment, or to school environ- 

 ment, to increased reading, or to bad lighting ? These 

 are all questions, unsettled for want of data, and for 

 want of an effective method of analysis. Nay, there is 

 hardly any social problem of which the like cannot be 

 said. Tuberculosis, insanity, alcoholism, employment of 

 women, want of employment of men, town life, health 



