The fit man’s burden: How early 20th century ideology framed poverty and mental illness as a demographic threat

“ While the burden has been lessened by the industrial and scientific progress of the last half century, it has been augmented by the fertility of the unfit; and the maintenance in idleness and comfort of the great and increasing army of defectives constitutes the fit man's burden. The unfit in the State include all those mental and moral and physical defectives who are unable or unwilling to support themselves according to the recognised laws of human society. They include the criminal, the pauper, the idiot and imbecile, the lunatic, the drunkard, the deformed, and the diseased. ”

“ The growth of the Criminal is one of the most ominous clouds on every national horizon. In spite of advances in criminology the rate of increase is so alarming that the "Unfit" threatens to be to the new Civilization what the Hun and Vandal were to the old. How to deal with this dangerous class is perhaps the most serious question that faces Sociologists at this hour. And something must be done speedily, else our civilization is in imminent peril of being swamped by the increasingly disproportionate progeny of the Criminal. ”

“ Notwithstanding the development of civilising, Christianising, and educational institutions, crime, insanity, and pauperism are increasing with startling rapidity. The true cause is to be found deep down in biological truth. Society is breeding from defective stock. The best fit to produce the best offspring are ceasing to produce their kind, while the fertility of the worst remains undisturbed. The most striking demographical phenomenon of recent years is the declining birth-rate of civilised nations. In Germany the birth-rate has fallen from 40 to 35 per thousand of the population ”

“ The practical outcome of our overlooking the continued accumulation of degenerates among our people by our fostering of all kinds of weakness will necessarily be, if it continues, that society will itself degenerate. Taxation will increase by leaps and bounds, and the industrious and self-respecting citizens will rebel, especially if taxation is expected to meet all the demands of a legislature that puts our humanitarian idea of justice in the place of charity. ”

“ The fertility of the unfit goes on unrestrained by any other check, save vice and misery. The great moral checks have not, and cannot have any place with them. But the State is, by its humanitarian zeal, limiting the scope and diminishing the force of these natural checks amongst all classes of the community, but especially amongst the unfit, so that its policy now fosters the fertility of this class, while it fails to arrest the declining nativity of our best citizens. The greater the fertility of the unfit, the greater the burden the fit have to bear, and the less their fertility. ”

“ Scientific Philanthropy is based on the intimate scientific connection between biology and sociology, first enunciated by M. Comte; is an attempt on the part of science to control the struggle, not only of man with Nature, but of man with man. ”

“ The conscious aim of scientific Philanthropy is, in the first place, to deal with the struggle of man with Nature—is to help men to help themselves; secondly, its aim is to regulate the struggle of man with man—is to help men to understand and adapt themselves to the conditions of existence. It is commonly noticed that the individual who succeeds in his struggle with Nature is apt to be successful in the good-natured struggle with his fellow-men. As Darwin proves, the intemperate suffer from a high rate of mortality, and the extremely profligate leave few offspring. ”

“ The process of elimination is nothing more nor less than the slow but steady selection of those who give evidence of their better adaptation to those external conditions into which they are born. No matter whether individuals survive, either for their mental or for their physical vigor, these qualities, for which they are selected, once gained and afterward enhanced by increased selection and heredity, become the varied faculties of the men and women of to-day. ”

“ There is economy in this process of elimination, whereby the transmission of the industrial vices is restricted, and, in the competition of life, the degraded members of society, unable to adapt themselves to the conditions imposed by physical and social environment, succumb before the rest of the population. The scientific idea of benevolence involves, first, the preparation of man to receive intelligently Nature's stern discipline—that is, to help him avoid all the evils coming from disobedience of physical agencies, and also to aid him in grasping those great rewards, which, as Huxley says. ”

“ An act done by a person who is an idiot, imbecile, lunatic or insane is not a crime. A person cannot be tried, sentenced to any punishment or punished for a crime while he is in a state of idiocy, imbecility, lunacy or insanity so as to be incapable of understanding the proceeding or making his defense. A person is not excused from criminal liability as an idiot, imbecile, lunatic or insane person except upon proof that, at the time of committing the alleged insane act, he was laboring under such a defect of reason as 1, not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing ”

“ It is obvious that the responsibility for crime as defined by the courts is far from harmonizing with the conception of competency entertained by the medical profession. To the psychiatrist, if the criminal act is the result of the mental condition it constitutes a symptom of the disease process. It is readily apparent from even a very brief reference to the statutes that a person concededly suffering from paranoia, general paresis, dementia praecox or any other well-defined psychosis is still criminally liable for his insane acts within certain limitations. ”

“ Natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion between the rates of increase in population and food, and the consequent struggle for existence.
All living organisms require food and space. The power of multiplication in plants and animals is so great that food or space is sooner or later entrenched upon, and then commences this inevitable struggle for existence. ”

“ In this struggle for life, the individuals best able to conform to their environment, i.e., the best able to resist adverse circumstances, to sustain hardships, to overcome difficulties, to defend themselves, to outstrip their fellows, in short, to harmonise function with environment, survive. These propagate their kind according to the law of heredity. Variations exist in the progeny, and the individuals whose variations best adapt them to their environment are the fittest to, and do, survive.
In a state of nature the weaklings perish. ”

“ The effect of the survival of all those who would be eliminated by the principle of selection, together with the rapid rate of increase of the reckless and degraded over the stronger and better members, is to increase the pressure of population on the means of subsistence. This it is which gives rise to the so-called "social problem." Scientific philanthropy is, therefore, the most modern attempt to deal with this problem, which began in primeval times, because of man's rapid multiplication, and which will continue as long as civilization continues. ”

“ Less sense of responsibility is attached to the rearing of a family, whilst the education of their children gives them little or no concern. They entertain no ambition that members of their family should compete in the struggle for social status. Their instincts and their impulses are their guide in all things. They marry early, and procreation is unrestrained except by the hardships of life.
This constitutes a numerous class in every large community, and includes the criminal, the drunkard, and the pauper, and many defectives such as epileptics and imbeciles. ”

“ There is a class in every large community, whose sense of responsibility in life is at zero, whose self-control is substituted by the law and its sanctions, and whose modes and habits of life are little better than those of the lower animals. Their appetites are stronger, their desires, though fewer, are more intense, and their self-control less easily and less frequently exerted than those in the highest planes of life. ”

“ It has already been urged that there is no evidence of any physiological defect in any class of society interfering with fertility. Sexual inhibition, from prudential motives is the real cause in New Zealand.
Sexual inhibition implies well-developed self-control, the very force in which almost all defectives are most deficient, and the absence of which makes them criminals, drunkards and paupers. In almost all defectives too, prudence is conspicuous by its absence. ”

“ What possible hope can there be for the progeny of defectives born with vicious, criminal, drunken or pauper tendencies, into an environment whose whole influence from infancy to maturity tends to accentuate and develop these inherited defects?
In this pitiable stratum of human society, vice and misery, as checks to increase, reign supreme, but as no other check exists, fertility is at its maximum, and keeps close up on the heels of the positive checks. ”

“ It has already been suggested, that the desire to limit families is due to a consciousness of responsibility on the part of prospective parents. They realise the stress of competition in the struggle for existence, they are anxious for their own pecuniary and social stability, and even more anxious that the children, for whose birth they are responsible, should be provided with the necessities and comforts of life which health and development require. They are eager, too, that their children should be equipped with a good education, and thus be given a fair advantage in the race of life. ”

“ As the numbers of the family increase, the difficulties of clothing and feeding and educating increase, and each member is the poorer for every birth, and in this sense an increasing birth-rate is a cause of poverty. The sense in which poverty causes a high birth-rate will be dealt with later on.
It will be readily conceded, that those actuated by the motives just considered, those with the keenest sense of responsibility in life, those capable of exercising the self-restraint which family limitation requires, constitute the best type of citizens in any community. ”

“ It is not suggested, however, that all those who prevent, without or within the marriage bond, do so from this worthy motive, nor is it suggested that all those who prevent are not extravagant in their demand for luxurious conditions for themselves and for their children.
Many require not merely the conditions necessary to the healthful development of each and every child they may bear, but they demand that child-bearing shall not entail hardships nor the prospect of hardships, shall not involve the surrender of any comfort or luxury, nor the prospect of any such surrender. ”

“ The higher checks to population, as they exist among the better classes of people, do not obtain amongst the defectives taken as a class.
Vice and misery are more active checks amongst the very poor, and abortion is practised to a very considerable extent, but the appalling fact remains, that the birth-rate of the unfit goes on undisturbed, while the introduction of higher checks amongst the normal classes has led to a marked decline, more marked than at first sight appears. ”

“ What is the public duty of relief? It will not be disputed that the function of government is to maintain the equal rights of all its citizens; it owes them in the first place justice. When the state undertakes to appropriate annually from the tax-payers millions of dollars for the support of the incapables, it is taking money from the former in no wise for the maintenance of their rights. The more the state does for the improvident the less it does for the provident. It is conceded that the right of government to educate the illiterate and to check the vicious is a just one ”

“ The love of luxurious idleness and a passion for excitement, which were typical of the voluntarily barren women of ancient Rome, have little place with us, as a cause of limited nativity.
Men and women reason out, that they cannot bear all the burdens that the State imposes upon them, support an increasing army of paupers, and lunatics and defectives, and non-producers, and that luxuriously, and at the same time incur the additional burden of rearing a large family. ”

“ The procreation of the unfit must be faced and grappled with. And the greater the decline in the birth-rate of our best stock, the more urgent does the solution of the problem become. For is not the proportion of the unfit to the fit yearly increasing!
It has become the most pressing duty of the State, in face of the great change that has so rapidly come over our natural increase, to declare that the procreation of the unfit shall cease, or at least, that it shall be considerably curtailed and placed among the vanishing evils, with a view to its final extinction. ”

“ It is possible to sterilize defective women, and the wives of defective men by an operation of simple ligature, which produces absolutely no change whatever in the subjects of it, beyond rendering this fertilization impossible, for the rest of life. This remedy for the great and growing evil which confronts us to-day is suggested, not to avenge but to protect society, and in profound pity for the classes who are a burden to themselves, as well as to those who have to tend and support them. ”

“ If the fertility of the unfit be reduced to a minimum, not only will many dreadful hereditary diseases be eradicated, but the fertility of the fit will receive a powerful stimulus, because of the great diminution there will necessarily be in the burdens they will have to bear.
The advantages of sterility to the unfit themselves will, on the whole, be incalculable. ”

“ The wife of any criminal would deem it a boon to be protected from the offspring of such a man, so would society.
If he is not married, then society must take the risk, and it is not very great. The women who will be his companions will be either sterilized by disease or by tubo-ligature, because they are defectives. This protection from the progeny of defective men, though not absolute, is complete enough for all practical purposes. ”

“ If all defective women and the wives of all defective men are sterilized, a greater improvement will take place in the race in the next 50 years, than has been accomplished by all the sanitation of the Victorian era. ”

“ Heinroth's views were illustrated by his statement [262] that "Insanity is the loss of moral liberty. It never depends upon a physical cause; it is not a disease of the body but of the mind—a sin.... The man who has during his whole life before his eyes and in his heart the image of God, has no reason to fear that he will ever lose his reason.... Man possesses a certain moral power which cannot be conquered by any physical power, and which only falls under the weight of his own faults.... From wrong doing springs all misfortune, including the disorders of the mind." ”

“ There are many who still believe that every hospital for mental diseases has its padded cells and underground dungeons. There is a rather widespread idea that the most common causes of insanity are cigarette smoking, religion and self abuse. Even in our most progressive communities it has been difficult, if not impossible, to entirely prevent the temporary detention, at least, of mental cases in jails and police stations. Very few general hospitals have psychopathic wards or any realization as to the necessity of establishing them. ”

“ Certainly, if in ever so small degree there is to be a stamping out of insanity, we must act on the principle, better let the individual suffer than run the risk of bequeathing a legacy of insanity to the next generation.... With regard to males, marriage would no doubt be highly beneficial in many instances, and if the risk of progeny is not run, may well be encouraged. ”

“ If such a criminal is a woman, she should be offered the alternative of surgical sterility or incarceration during the child bearing period of her life; if a man, his wife should be offered this remedy against the procreation of criminals in exchange for her husband, on the expiry of his sentence, or the protection of divorce.
No woman in the child-bearing period of life should be released from an Asylum, until this operation has been performed. If a man is committed, his wife should have the option of divorce or be sterilized before his release. ”

“ If upon consideration of the medical report of the contracting parties, in accordance with the law upon the subject, a certificate of marriage were refused, a certificate of sterilization by tubo-ligature, forwarded to the Board by a Surgeon, should entitle to the marriage certificate.
No law should attempt to step in between two lovers, who have become attached to each other by the bonds of a strong affection, lest a greater evil befall both themselves and society. ”

“ The second group, those who charge it with interfering with natural selection and wasting opportunity on lame ducks do not shake its conviction. It knows perfectly well that not social work but the abundance of mere food and shelter and the ingrained sympathy or solidarity, or what you will, of civilized man is what prevents the elimination of the unfit and that these unfit can only be made innocuous and self-supporting by methods and arrangements worked out by the intelligence of the especially fit. ”