From this we shall expect, in the same stock, signs of neuropathic taint other than the three diseases dealt with here, and these we get; for alcoholism, criminality, chorea, deformities, insanity and other brain diseases, are not infrequent among the relatives of a neuropath, showing that the family germ-plasm is unsound.

Epilepsy, one symptom of taint, is more or less interchangeable with other defects; the taint, as a whole, is an inheritable unit whose inheritance will appear as any one of many defects.  This is shown by the fact that very few epileptics have an epileptic parent.  Starr’s analysis of 700 cases of epilepsy emphasizes this point.

Epilepsy in a parent               6
Epilepsy in a near relative      136
Alcoholism in a parent           120
Nervous Diseases in family       118
Rheumatism and Tuberculosis      184
Combinations of above diseases   142

As medicine and surgery cannot add or delete plasmic factors, the only way to stamp out neuropathy in severe forms would be to sterilize victims by X-rays.  This would be painless, would protect the race and not interfere with personal or even with sexual liberty.  In fifty years such diseases would be almost extinct, and those arising from accident or the chance union of dormant factors in apparently normal people could easily be dealt with.

There are 100,000 epileptics in Great Britain, and as all their children carry a taint which tends to reappear as epilepsy in a later generation the number of epileptics doubles every forty years.  We protect these unfortunates against others; why not posterity against them?

Neuropaths must pass on some defect; therefore, though victims may marry, no neuropath has a right to have children.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXV

CHARACTER

“All men are not equal, either at birth or by training.  Nature gives each of us the neural clay, with its properties of pliability and of receiving impressions; nurture moulds and fashions it, until a character is formed, a mingling of innate disposition and acquired powers.  But clay will be clay to the end; you cannot expect it to be marble.”—­Thomson & Geddes.

    “Heaven lay not my transgression to my charge.”—­King John.

It is essential that attendants, relatives, and friends carefully study the character of neuropaths, and recognize clearly how abnormal it is, for untold misery is caused by judging neuropaths by normal standards.

Patients are often harshly treated because others regard the victim of defective inhibition as having gone deliberately to work, through wicked perversity and pure wilfulness, to make himself a nuisance, to persist in being a nuisance, and to refuse to be other than a nuisance, rather than exercise what more fortunate men are pleased to term self-control.