Michael F. Guyer

CRIME AND DELINQUENCY

The Relative Importance of Heredity and Environment in This Field Uncertain.—The whole question of crime and delinquency is a highly complex one. Here, perhaps, more than in any other phase of race betterment we find the greatest difficulty in separating the effects of hereditary predisposition from the results of unfavorable environment. While there is no longer a reasonable doubt about such nervous disorders as epilepsy, feeble-mindedness and certain forms of insanity being rooted largely in ancestral taints, the degree to which crime or delinquency is based on heredity is far more questionable. Every student of genetics knows that we may have dwarf plants because the constitution of the germ is of a nature to produce only such individuals, or we may have dwarfed plants because of adverse conditions of soil and lack of an opportunity to climb or rise to their full capacity. Bateson pertinently remarks, “The stick will not make the dwarf pea climb, though without it the tall can never rise. Education, sanitation, and the rest are but the giving or withholding of opportunity.” The important sociological question for us to determine is which of these lowly peas of the human family are really dwarfs and which are dwarfed simply because the stick of opportunity on which to climb is lacking.

Beyond doubt a considerable portion of crime and degeneracy is due in large measure to innate inclination, but with just as little doubt much is the effect mainly of vicious habits acquired through an unwholesome environment. A normal appetite or impulse may be given a pathological trend by bad influences. And one has to reckon, moreover, with degrees of hereditary aptitude to crime. Just what is the measure of normality? To what extent by developing to their highest point certain inhibitive or opposing tendencies, can we counteract certain inherent proclivities for wrong-doing? By what means shall we sift the congenital defectives from the victims of suppressed opportunities? These and kindred questions confront us at the very outset of our studies of crime and delinquency. It is obvious that although we may institute the strictest elimination of the socially unfit, unless we can provide a wholesome environment for the fit, lapses into unfitness are sure to recur.

Feeble-Mindedness Often a Factor.—The conviction is steadily growing among students of human heredity that a considerable amount of crime, gross immorality and degeneracy is due at bottom to feeble-mindedness and that, therefore, if we can once eliminate feeble-mindedness, these vicious accompaniments will at the same time in equal measure disappear. Goddard, for example, one of our authorities on the inheritance of feeble-mindedness, is convinced that a large proportion of the delinquent girls who fill our reformatories are actually feeble-minded. They are often the higher grade or moron type, and their mental condition remains unsuspected because they have never been thoroughly tested in this respect.

Many Delinquent Girls Mentally Deficient.—According to Havelock Ellis, 2,500 of some 15,000 women who passed through Magdalen homes in England were definitely feeble-minded and were known to have added a thousand illegitimate children to the population.

The preliminary reports of the so-called white slave investigations now in progress in New York City classes 25 per cent. of these unfortunate women as mentally incapable of taking care of themselves. Other investigations indicate that from 40 to 60 per cent. of this class of women are defectives. For example, from the report of the Massachusetts “Commission for the Investigation of the White Slave Traffic, So-Called,” one reads: “Of 300 prostitutes, 154, or 51 per cent., were feeble-minded. All doubtful cases were recorded as normal. The mental defect of these 154 women was so pronounced and evident as to warrant the legal commitment of each one as a feeble-minded person or as a defective delinquent.... The 135 women designated as normal, as a class were of distinctly inferior intelligence. More time for study of these women, more complete histories of their life in the community, and opportunity for more elaborate psychological tests might verify the belief of the examiners that many of them were also feeble-minded or insane.”

The data from some of our public reformatories, industrial schools and state homes for delinquent girls, are very instructive in this respect. Reports from a number of such institutions show that many of their inmates are mentally subnormal. The proportions range from thirty-three per cent. in the New Jersey Reformatory at Rahway to eighty-nine per cent. in the institution at Geneva, Illinois.

Institutional Figures Misleading.—However, significant as are these figures from institutions for delinquents, one should not be misled by them. They are undoubtedly not representative of offenders in general, but of a selected group of the most hopeless cases. In the first place the more capable individuals escape the dragnet which lands the defective delinquents in an institution, and furthermore, because of liberal systems of probation, only the more incorrigible or the very stupid make up the bulk of the population of such places. Miss Augusta F. Bronner, assistant director of the Psychopathic Institute of the Juvenile Court of Chicago, from a careful study of five hundred and five cases of delinquent boys and girls in the Detention Home, chosen with as little selection as possible, finds the proportion of mentally subnormal among them to be less than ten per cent.

Many Prisoners Mentally Subnormal.—Doctor Walter S. Fernald, of the Massachusetts School for Feeble-minded, estimates that “at least 25 per cent. of the inmates of our penal institutions are mentally defective.” Among the various available estimates at hand this seems to be a fairly conservative approximation. Hastings H. Hart points out that this calculation of 25 per cent. means that there are 20,000 adult defective delinquents in prison, and 6,000 youths in juvenile reformatories, or a total of 26,000 in custody in the United States.

The Inhibitions Necessary to Social Welfare Not Well Established in All.—But let us look at this matter of delinquency a little more in detail. In common with other living creatures mankind has two strongly predominating instincts without which there can be no prolonged individual or racial existence, namely, the self-preservative and the reproductive. Says Schiller: “While philosophers are disputing about the government of the world, Hunger and Love are performing the task.” Under self-preservative would be included everything pertaining to food, property and self-protection. In addition, however, man, together with certain other social animals, has developed a third set of activities or instincts—an impulsion toward the preservation of the community to which he belongs—and so far has this evolved in his case that it outranks in importance the other two. For the highest accomplishments and ideals of the race are in last analysis expressions of this social instinct. But with this system of mutual help comes the necessity of certain restraints, because for society to exist its members must impose upon themselves, or have imposed upon them, certain inhibitions of their self-preservative and reproductive instincts.

Being a late acquisition of the race and less firmly ingrained, the social instinct is not well established in all individuals. Some have it sufficiently strong to exercise of their own accord the necessary inhibitions of other instincts. Experience has shown that others, either through a lack or through a wrong cultivation of it, can not or will not do so unaided. For the latter, society has instituted certain conventions and the criminal law whereby through a system of restraints and punishments such an individual is held in check either by actual physical restraint of his property or person or through the powerfully inhibitive factors of shame or fear. Man as a normal member of society must constantly take heed of the physical, intellectual or moral danger the exercise of a given feeling, action or procedure on his part will bring to humanity, and govern himself accordingly.

But it is in just these very inhibitions that mental defectives are lacking. They are almost invariably anti-social types because they are unable to establish the personal abstentions which are necessary for the good of the community. While in the individual of innate normal mentality anti-social traits may have developed because of improper training or surroundings, in mentally defective types some factor or factors necessary to normality have been left out of their make-up and as a result they are often wholly lacking in social instincts or have these so feebly developed that education and exhortations toward social ideals are fruitless. We can not appeal successfully if there is nothing to appeal to; we can not develop something out of nothing.

The High-Grade Moron a Difficult Problem.—One great difficulty in identifying the high-grade morons who are a bountiful source of our criminals is our almost universal failure to recognize that a memory test alone is not sufficient to determine the mental responsibility of an individual. Not only memory, but judgment, will-power and perhaps, also, to a lesser degree, the powers of attention and concentration are all indispensable elements in the make-up of a normal individual. There are cases on record of imbeciles with prodigious memories, yet hopelessly incapable of caring for themselves or of respecting the rights of others. In fact certain types of morons, usually cunning, often prepossessing and superficially clever, are characterized by good memories and will moralize volubly, although their wills are too weak to inhibit impulses when they face temptation. It is obvious that just in proportion as the intelligence of the high-grade degenerate approaches normality and yet remains abnormal, the more dangerous he may become to society.

Degenerate Strains.—A number of family records are now available which show convincing evidence of the hereditary nature of a degeneracy which finds expression in pauperism, immorality and crime.

As has already been pointed out, there is reason to believe that much of this is based in some degree on feeble-mindedness. One of the most remarkable of these is the recent study on degeneracy by Goddard as set forth in his book called The Kallikak Family. The record is that of six generations of descendants from an original progenitor to whom the fictitious name of Kallikak has been assigned. This individual, descended from good stock, before his marriage met a feeble-minded girl by whom he became the father of a feeble-minded son. Later he married a normal woman by whom he had normal children. Thus from one normal father have sprung two lines of progeny, one vitiated with feeble-mindedness, the other normal. The comparison may be readily made by drawing up in parallel columns the data as follows:

Line A		Line B
In five generations 480 direct descendants from a normal father father and a feeble-minded mother have been accounted for as follows:		In five generations 496 descendants from the same normal father as in Line A and a normal mother have the following record:
143 known to be feeble-minded.		All but one of normal mentality.
291 mental status unknown or doubtful.		Two men known to be alcoholic.
36 illegitimate.		One case of religious mania.
33 sexually immoral, mostly prostitutes. 24 confirmed alcoholics.		Among the rest have been found nothing but good representative citizenship, numbering doctors, lawyers, educators, judges, traders, etc.
3 epileptics.		No epileptics or criminals.
82 died in infancy.		Only fifteen children died in infancy.
3 criminals.
8 keepers of disreputable houses.
46 only ones known to ben ormal.

Certainly there is abundant food for thought in these two records.

If we take still other families of criminal or degenerate antecedents the same multiplication of viciousness, as a rule, is in evidence. Thus, Margaret, the Mother of Criminals, has left a progeny of some 700 paupers, prostitutes and criminals, some of the women bearing as many as twenty children. The famous Jukes family, so often cited, with its 310 professional paupers, 300 deaths in infancy, 440 physical wrecks from debauchery, 50 prostitutes, 60 habitual thieves, 7 murderers, and 130 other convicts out of a total 1,200 descendants who have been identified, has alone cost the state of New York $1,250,000 in the care of its criminal, defective and immoral progeny.

Another family record, the Zeros, reported by Poellman, of Bonn, starts with a female confirmed drunkard. In six generations of her descendants, totaling 800 people, Poellman found 102 professional beggars, 107 illegitimates, 181 prostitutes, 54 in almshouse, 76 convicted of serious crime, 7 of murder, and costing some $1,206,000. Or we might cite the so-called Tribe of Ishmael, the progeny of a neurotic man and a half-breed woman. They have spread their ill-favored spawn over various of the central states in a veritable flood of imbecility and petty crime. And to these families may be added the records of The Hill Folk, The Pineys, or others of the several recent studies of degenerate strains. All bear the same message of rapidly multiplying degeneracy.

Intensification of Defects by Inbreeding.—Most of these regional surveys that are now in progress show that there is particular danger in a population becoming broken up into small communities and isolated. Under such conditions there is a pronounced tendency to intermarry, and if deterioration is already present in the stock such communities become centers of marked degeneracy. The situation is well exemplified in the following excerpt from Davenport:

“I have been going over the records of one family in New York, the so-called Nam family. There were 55 per cent. consanguineous matings, marriage between cousins, in one generation, and, owing to the fact that the strain was already loaded with defects, we can see how these defects were concentrated by these cousin marriages, so that about 90 per cent. of the strain is feeble-minded. There were fully 90 per cent. of the men who are unable to resist the lure of liquor. One-fourth of the children are born illegitimates. Infanticides, incest, murder, harlotry, are all over the chart. This is a highly inbred community, keeping a nearly pure strain of social defects, and the cost to the community has been a million and a half on a fair way of figuring, not directly in the care, but indirectly in the damage they have done. These constitute a rural community. Out of this community we can trace those who have gone to the cities and become murderers, prostitutes and thieves. They are not confined to one state; they spread out over the country. One branch of the family came to the state of Minnesota. We sent to one of Doctor Rogers’ trained field workers to learn whether she had ever heard of this family, and received a reply that the family was well known to social workers in the state of Minnesota. These strains of degenerates are not local matters at all; they are matters of national interest.”

Concerning crime and delinquency, we find that all evidence tends to show that an alarming increase is in progress although satisfactory data are hard to obtain. It is certain that there is a tremendously disproportionate increase in the number of prisoners in recent years compared with general population, for while the total population has increased three and one-half fold, the prison element has increased fifteen fold. According to Wier, in this country there are four and one-half times as many murders for every million of our population to-day as there were twenty years ago.

It may be urged that this increase in prison population is not a disproportionate increase in the number of defectives or criminals, but only an increase in the number sent to prison, and this is probably a partial truth—but when we recall such pedigree as those of the Nams, the defective line of Kallikaks and other known unsound strains, he must be hopeful indeed who can find much consolation in this supposition. In any event, no such uncertainty exists regarding the number of murders and homicides, since these have in all probability been as fully recorded in the past as at present.

Vicious Surroundings Not a Sufficient Explanation in Degenerate Stocks.—It is sometimes urged that we are not dealing in such cases with degenerate strains, but merely with unfortunate individuals who have been subjected to pernicious surroundings from the beginning. And it can not be denied that parents who are mentally defective, dissipated or syphilitic afford most noxious developmental and environmental conditions for their children. But when one notes how intimately the moral degeneracy in such stocks is bound up with some degree of feeble-mindedness, he is strongly skeptical toward the sufficiency of such an interpretation, although environment undoubtedly intensifies the results. Concerning this point Davenport says:

And to Davenport’s testimony may we add that of Doctor Wilmarth, who, speaking of children at the home for feeble-minded, says:

By No Means All Delinquents Are Defectives.—One must not overlook the fact, however, that delinquent and defective are by no means synonymous terms, and that many delinquents are with little doubt the product of adverse social circumstances.

The recent careful work of Doctor William Healy[13] in connection with the juvenile delinquents of Chicago shows convincingly that the underlying causations of delinquency are many. Such factors as immorality or constant quarreling of parents, bad companions, lack of parental control, defective sense organs, debilitating habits, lack of healthy mental interests and a host of other environmental factors are not infrequently sufficient in themselves to develop delinquency in the absence of inherited deficiency. The present-day efforts of the student of heredity should not be misunderstood. They are not attempts to make all delinquents out defectives, but rather to determine what percentage of delinquents may be legitimately reckoned as defective and to make the facts known. Since there is no longer any reasonable doubt that, to express it in the mildest terms, an amount of delinquency far from negligible is due in great measure to congenital omissions or propensities, then the sooner the public learns this the better, for we may then set about supplementing our present efforts at race betterment through external improvement by devising means of cleansing the fountain source as well.

It can scarcely be doubted that the average man differs little if any in inherent personality and capacity from many a criminal who is such by occasion rather than by undue predisposition. Who can truthfully answer how many individuals there are who are not potentially criminals to some extent, given sufficient evocative conditions of ignorance, vice, adverse economic pressure and undue temptation?

No Special Inheritable Crime-Factor.—The main difficulty in trying to find a hereditary basis for crime lies in the multiplicity of things crime may be. The individual impulsions which lead to certain offenses may be utterly different from those which conduce to others. Undoubtedly many inborn tendencies which are perfectly normal or neutral in themselves may be warped by circumstances into the commission of what are classified as crimes. The moral man may have the same desire for a thing that the criminal does, but when he finds that this desire can only be gratified by injury to others, he inhibits it because of his repugnance to such injury. The criminal makes no such inhibition.

In general, crime means an offense of some kind against person, property or state. But a biological analysis of it, could it be made, would require among other things knowledge of crime in terms of motive or lack of motive, whether the act was intended to benefit the perpetrator, some other person, or even the race or state; whether the offense was one of dishonesty, of cupidity, of lust, or of violence against another.

As a matter of fact no satisfactory classification of crime can be made since so many factors enter and in such varying degrees. Most classifications made in our legal codes are a hodge-podge based on a mixture of motive on the part of the participant, degree of turpitude involved, nature and extent of the injury inflicted, and the object against which the offense was perpetrated, whether an individual, society or the state. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that in many instances what was crime in the past is no longer so, and vice versa many things which are regarded as criminal to-day were not considered so in the past. So the futility of seeking a specific inherent propensity for “crime” is manifest. How, for instance, in terms of hereditary determiners shall we draw the fine lines of distinction among those who bribe legislators and legal officials, those who are avaricious and dishonest in the world of trade, and those who are wilfully obtuse in providing proper safeguards for employees?

What Is Meant by a Born Criminal?—All we can do is to fall back on the assurance that any act directly or indirectly injurious to society is an offense, and that those offenders who are congenitally unable to distinguish between what is generally accepted as right and wrong, or who if recognizing this are nevertheless uncontrollably impelled toward or are unable to refrain from anti-social acts because of some inherent condition of intellectual or volitional make-up, may be legitimately classed as individuals born with an aptitude for crime and social transgressions. In such individuals the natural mental make-up is lacking in some of its necessary elements so that memory, judgment, or will-power are not up to the minimum that is necessary for the establishment of proper conduct. In some cases, apparently, this lack finds expression in almost any kind of vice or crime into which circumstances happen to lead the individual. In others, however, there seem to be tendencies toward the commission of certain types of crime or vice. Certain family strains are characterized by petty thieving, others by deeds of violence, and still others by sexual offenses. Certain types of mental defect are closely associated with certain crimes. Thus sufferers from incipient paresis seem particularly prone to commit assaults and larceny; epileptics, crimes of brutality and violence.

The Epileptic Criminal Especially Dangerous.—One of the characteristics of epilepsy, indeed, emphasized by various psychiatrists, is that frequently it leads to loss of those forms of self-restraint which are absolutely indispensable to morality and the safety of society. Cruelty, atrocious sexual offenses and other vicious crimes are the result. It is a noteworthy fact, moreover, that often in the milder forms of affliction, where instead of well-marked convulsions only momentary lapses of consciousness occur, the greatest amount of mental and moral deterioration and fluctuation is sometimes found.

The situation as regards the epileptic is well presented by Doctor William Healy, Director of the Juvenile Psycopathic Institute of Chicago, in an article entitled “Epilepsy and Crime; the Cost”, in the Illinois Medical Journal, November, 1912. He says:

Mental Disorders Most Frequently Associated With Crime.—Doctor Charles Mercier, an English authority on crime and insanity, in enumerating the mental disorders most frequently associated with crime, places the insanity of drunkenness first. Any one who will take the trouble to verify the facts in his own community will find that a large percentage, frequently considerably over half, of the arrests made by the police are for acts committed while the offender was more or less under the influence of alcohol. Next to drunkenness among mental disorders which lead to crime Doctor Mercier places feeble-mindedness. Next to feeble-mindedness comes epilepsy; then paranoia or systematized delusion; next paresis; and lastly melancholia.

Paranoics are peculiar in that they are particularly apt to attack persons of prominence. Highly egotistical, they almost invariably believe themselves or some one or some cause dear to them, the subject of a plot, perhaps to rob them, to torture them, to steal their inventions or literary productions, or to persecute them in some way. Two if not three of our murdered presidents owe their assassinations to paranoics. Many rulers have been attacked and some killed by such insane individuals. Most of the “cranks” who write threatening letters are lunatics of this type.Of the kinds of mental unsoundness known to be inheritable which are of special significance from the standpoint of crime and delinquency undoubtedly feeble-mindedness ranks first. We have already seen that as our methods for detecting the higher grades of feeble-mindedness become more accurate we disclose in border-line cases a veritable hot-bed of mental incapacity suitable for the engendering of the criminal and the vicious. Here in addition to some of the more pronounced criminal types belong hosts of our chronic petty offenders, our sexually vicious and our “won’t-works”. One interesting outcome of a recent investigation into the army of unemployed in England was the discovery of the general unfitness of these unemployed. In our own country the habitually unemployed are so not because of lack of work, but largely because it is unprofitable to employ them.

The Bearing of Immigration on Crime and Delinquency.—Perhaps in no field more than this of crime and delinquency, especially in so far as it is based on innate deficiency, does the gravity of the immigration question impress itself on us. How stupendous this problem[15] has become may be realized from the fact that according to the census of 1910, 13,345,545, or one out of seven of the inhabitants of the United States, were foreign born. And if we add to these the 18,897,837 of whom one or both parents were of foreign birth, we reach the astonishing total of over 32,000,000, or more than one-third of our total population, who are foreign born, or who have one or both parents of foreign birth.

During the decade from 1900 to 1910, 8,500,000 foreigners came to the United States, of whom 5,250,000 remained to make a permanent home. This shows how rapidly our whole population might be radically changed. In recent years the source of our immigrants has shifted proportionately from northwestern Europe to southern and eastern Europe (Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia), and whether for weal or woe this new blood must inevitably leave its impress upon us. Does it not behoove us then to seek with anxious eyes some knowledge of these invading hordes with whom we are to mingle our life-blood?

Even the most superficial examination may well cause us grave concern. We find that in one year (1908) at Ellis Island alone, 3,741 paupers, 2,900 persons with contagious disease, 184 insane, 121 feeble-minded, 136 criminals, 124 prostitutes and 65 idiots were denied entrance, and yet, according to the estimate of Doctor F. K. Sprague, of the United States Public Health Service, probably only about 5 per cent of the mentally deficient and 25 per cent. of those who will become insane have been detected. When confronted by such data we can begin to realize what we are facing. Others estimate that from 6 to 7 per cent. of the immigrants who are now arriving are feeble-minded. We learn further that recently while the foreign-born population of New York state was about 30 per cent., the foreign-born population of the insane hospitals of the state was over 43 per cent., and at one time approximately 65 per cent. for New York City. In one year (1908) 84 per cent. of the patients in Bellevue Hospital, New York City, were of foreign parentage. Paresis, which probably always has syphilis as its antecedent, is proportionately twice as prevalent among foreigners as among natives in New York City.

But from the standpoint of inheritance, however great the danger may be from classifiable defectives, it is probably far greater from that much larger class of aliens we are now receiving with open arms who are below the mental and physical average of their own countries. Moreover, with our present system of inspection there is no way of detecting the grades of feeble-mindedness above idiocy and imbecility in the great numbers of foreign children under five when brought in, who are beginning to show up in alarming numbers in the schools of some of our larger cities. About thirty per cent. of the annual increment of our population is due to immigration and not to births; and once in our country the alien far outbreeds the native stock, with relatively little increase in death-rate, thus making a double contribution to the increase of population. When we take all these facts into consideration it certainly is high time that we arouse from our self-complacent attitude and consider the whole question of immigration most earnestly.

In spite of the fact that many individuals are caught in the net of inspection at our portals, it is clear that still more rigid rejection[16] is imperative. The inspectors at our various ports are doing the best they can under the circumstances, but there are at present too few of them and they are too restricted in their powers to meet the situation satisfactorily. Moreover, when at one of our ports in one year (1910), of 1,483 immigrants certified by the inspecting surgeons as unfit to land because of serious mental or physical defects, 1,370 were landed anyway, it is evident that there is a strong and reprehensible pull somewhere to evade the obvious intent of the law.

It remains for us as a people to decide whether we shall continue to let the large employers of cheap labor, the railroad and steamship agents and brokers, who care nothing about the innate fitness of the immigrants they bring, determine the character of our future population, or whether we shall insist on a proper regulation of this flood so that we may receive only an honest, intelligent, industrious and healthy stock. To continue to absorb these aliens with as little selection as we now do is nothing short of criminal carelessness. Let us not be deceived by the promptings of a misguided sentiment, “The voice is Jacob’s voice, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” The voice is Jacob’s voice, nor should this voice of the easily persuaded, the sentimentalist, the interested organization to which the relatives of the defective alien belong, or any other pressure move us from our obvious duty of refusing to fasten upon this country an incubus of degeneracy for which we as a nation are in no way responsible.

To render us safe we should not only have more carefully drawn laws and more rigid selection at our ports of entry, but we should if possible also know the stock from which our future citizens come. This is peculiarly desirable for such defects as feeble-mindedness and various other mental imperfections, some of which require prolonged observation for detection. Davenport estimates that it is wholly within the realm of possibility and good business sense to maintain a corps of trained inspectors abroad in the chief centers from which our immigrants come who shall certify the desirable applicants. He makes the point that the national expense would be far less than the cost of maintaining the army of defectives we are now admitting to our own country, many of whom almost immediately become public charges, to say nothing of the hordes of carriers who though normal themselves, will transmit undesirable traits.

Sexual Vice.—As to sexual vice, the skein is indeed a tangled one. Since nine-tenths of the difficulty centers in a lack of self-restraint, and inasmuch as the mating instinct is one of the strongest that tugs at the flesh of humanity, it is obvious that those by nature deficient in volitional control will almost without exception give way to the call. So as might be expected the hordes of our feeble-minded and epileptic are always a source of grave danger in this respect. However, the mentally enfeebled are by no means the only offenders; indeed, they are probably not the majority. The true situation is finally dawning on society and the reformer’s call for instruction in “sex-hygiene” resounds through the land. The whole matter is one of the most perplexing and momentous that confronts us to-day.The Question of School Instruction in Sex-Hygiene.—While the writer does not for an instant underestimate the gravity of the situation, and has only contempt for the nonsense that is palmed off on children about their origin, or the indelicate self-consciousness which puts under the ban the discussion of so serious a problem by adults, still he is not convinced that the universal teaching of the subject to children in schools by the average teacher, as advocated by some, is to be the solution of the matter or is even a wise attempt at solution. Yet he freely admits that he is possibly overfearful of the effects of the undesirable features of such instruction. True it is that all children do learn, frequently at an astonishingly early age, about sex, and their knowledge is usually of an undesirable kind from unreliable and often vicious sources, and it is equally true that parents, either through ignorance or prudery, generally can not be depended on to give the child necessary instruction. But before entering on a wide-spread campaign of undiluted sex-instruction in schools might it not be more prudent to make an attempt toward reaching fathers and mothers and convincing them of the necessity of dealing more frankly and intelligently with their children regarding sex?

Even to the novice in psychology the powerful nature of suggestion is known, and with this knowledge before us, is it not wiser to strive in the main to keep the child’s mind off of sex rather than specifically to focus it on it by special convocations and discourse? If our psychology means anything, then the worst possible thing we can do for a child is to make him unduly sex-conscious. Something might be done profitably perhaps in schools in an unobtrusive way by specially gifted persons, but the self-conscious way in which most teachers go about topics of sex is certainly not reassuring to the thoughtful observer as regards the benefit derived from such instruction. The one evident method of accomplishing wholesome sex-instruction in schools, devoid of all possibility of undesirable suggestion and sex-consciousness, is in the form of biological work where plants and animals are studied in all their relations, the subject of propagation being taken up in as matter-of-fact a way as the functioning of any other organ system of plants or animals. In such a course, long before the subject of sex in higher animals need be approached the pupil will have developed an attitude of mind which will lead him to see nothing unusual or suggestive in the function of sex no matter where it may be found. Incidentally, inasmuch as the manner in which germs affect living organisms should be studied in such a course anyway, it would be a simple matter to give all necessary information about the dangers of infection from venereal diseases.

Mere Knowledge Not the Crux of the Sex Problem.—However, desirable as correct knowledge about sex is, knowledge alone is not the crux of the sex problem. The moral dangers and abuses that we are trying to circumvent lie rather in the realm of the emotions than that of the intellect. The problem must be solved from a broader foundation than mere information. The all-important consideration is the early establishment of general habits of self-control so that these may become incorporated in the nervous organization of the child and become inhibitory anchors against passions and temptation. Children must be taught to suppress the present impulse, to sacrifice the immediate pleasure for the more distant or permanent good. They must be practised in calling up feelings that will counteract other promptings which if followed blindly are inimical to social welfare. Their control must come from within not as a matter of external compulsion. That way character lies.

So in viewing the problem of sexual hygiene the writer feels that our attempts toward damming the torrents in the adolescent by a belated effort at verbal instruction on sex-hygiene is at best only a palliative or an attempt to cure the symptoms of a more deeply-seated, organic, social malady. The treatment should have been in progress long before in the form of training in self-control, and in the inculcation of the sense of dignity and self-respect which springs from the individual’s consciousness of being, not a slave to his desires, but his own master. This, together with the judicious schooling of boys in a greater chivalry and respect for womanhood, and of girls in the necessity of meriting such esteem, will, in my estimation, carry us further than formal courses in sex-hygiene.

Early Training in Self-Restraint an Important Preventive of Crime and Delinquency.—As to crime and delinquency in general, it is evident that the same early training in self-restraint is a most important factor of prevention. A wise warden in charge of a large prison says, “Most of these men are here because they have not learned sufficiently the lesson of self-control.” This is the age of preventive medicine, why not also of preventive crime and delinquency? Instead of confining our practise to punishing offenders, necessary as this may be under the present conditions, why not strive more to prevent the commission of offenses? As far as normal individuals are concerned much can be done by early cultivation in self-discipline and through the establishment of moral backbone by training in the overcoming of difficulties. Much, very much, also remains to be done in the correction of wrong social conditions.

Unpardonable to Permit Delinquent Defectives to Multiply Their Kind.—As for our mental defectives and moral imbeciles, knowing now how strongly hereditary the underlying factors of these conditions are, and with no preventive or curative agents in sight, to let them produce progeny, is clearly unpardonable.