The Defective Classes. 
181 
Many people suppose that the excitement and strain of city life conduces 
to insanity. Others say that thedoneliness of country life has the same 
effect. An English physician has taken the pains to tabulate the statistics 
of insanity for the city of London for forty years and for several purely 
agricultural counties in the south of England with about the same popula¬ 
tion for the same period of time, and finds that there is no difference be" 
tween city and country" in the amount of insanity. But for crime, all 
statistics show clearly that crime is concentrated in the cities, which are 
the refuge of the criminal classes and the nurseries of young criminals in 
the neglected street children. Pauperism is greater in the city than in the 
country, though this may arise from the corrupt municipal governments 
encouraging pauperism to win votes. 
Now I come to some very curious results of the United States of 1880. 
According to the figures of the census, insanity is about twice as prevalent 
among foreigners as among native whites, and about twice as prevalent 
among native whites as among negroes. In round numbers one in a thou¬ 
sand of the negroes of the United States are insane, one in five hundred of 
the native whites, and one in two hundred and fifty of the foreigners. 
There has been a great deal of nonsense written upon this by learned men 
about foreign governments shipping their insane to us to take care of. The 
fact is that the ordinary immigrants are healthy young people, with less 
insanity than the average, and that comparatively few cases of insanity 
are shipped over here, and that in recent years a strict watch is kept at the 
ports against the shipment of any of the defective classes to this country. 
One observation will prick this bubble. In the census the children of for¬ 
eigners born here are counted as natives, properly enough; but by taking 
away from the foreign population most of the children and adding them 
to the native population, it makes an unfair basis on which to estimate the 
proportion of insanity, as children do not become insane. The proper 
basis would be what is the proportion of foreign born insane to the adult 
foreign population, and of native insane to the adult native population. 
On this basis there is still a slight disproportion of the foreign and native 
insane, but not more than can be accounted for by the comparative ignor¬ 
ance and poverty of the mass of the foreigners who come here and the 
trials they have to meet in adapting themselves to the conditions of life in 
a strange land. But why are negroes so much less insane than white 
people ? I do not pretend to say. Perhaps it may be on account of their 
easy, happy dispositions, which makes them less thrifty than the whites, 
but also less liable to bring themselves into insanity. Dr. Bryce, of the 
Alabama State hospital, says that insanity since the war is rapidly increas¬ 
ing among the negroes. 
There is a greater proportion of crime and pauperism among foreigners 
than among natives, probably because of their greater ignorance and pov¬ 
erty, and because they have been accustomed to rely upon a paternal gov¬ 
ernment and do not get accustomed to the freedom of America. The 
