“The condition of disease, debility, and defective sight and hearing, in the public elementary schools in poorer districts, is appalling.  The research of a recent Royal Commission has disclosed that of the children in the public schools of Edinburgh, 70 per cent, are suffering from disease of some kind, more than half from defective vision, nearly half from defective hearing, and 30 per cent, from starvation.  The physical deterioration of the recruits who offer themselves for the army is a subject of increasing concern.  There are grounds for at least suspecting a growing degeneracy of the population of the United Kingdom, particularly in the great towns.”

The following table gives the charges before Magistrates in our Courts:—­

Year.  Proportion per thousand of
                                         mean population.

1894 24.76

1897 26.87

1898 29.42

1899 29.48

1900 31.54

1901 33.20

1902 35.19

Now who are the unfit?  Are they more fertile than the fit? and do they propagate their kind?

The following defects constitute their victims members of that great class of degenerates who are unfit to procreate healthy normal offspring.  Many of these conditions are partly congenital and partly acquired, but in the majority of defectives a transmitted taint is present.

I. Congenital defects:—­

1.  Idiocy. 2.  Imbecility. 3.  Criminal Taint. 4.  Insanity. 5.  Inebriate Taint. 6.  Pauperism. 7.  Deaf Mutism. 8.  Epilepsy.

II.  Acquired defects:—­

1.  Crime. 2.  Insanity. 3.  Epilepsy. 4.  Inebrity. 5.  Confirmed Pauperism.

With the exception of the very young and the very old, all members of society, who have to be supported by others, constitute the unfit.  Many are supported by friends and relatives, but year by year, it is becoming more noticeable, that the moral guardians of the unfit are shirking their responsibility and handing their defective relatives over to the State and demanding their gratuitous support as a right.

Dr. MacGregor, Inspector of Asylums and Hospitals, N.Z., in his report for 1898, p. 5, says:—­

“As if the State had a vested interest in the degradation of its people, I find that they, as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, are responding to our efforts to sap their self-respect by doing their utmost to throw the cost of maintaining their relatives on the ratepayers.  I constantly hear the plea urged that as taxpayers and old colonists they have a right to send their relatives to State institutions.”