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OCR Rendition - approximate
420 Life and Letters of Francis Galton "An important Committee of this Council is charged with the care of those who fail to pass the Poll examination in Eugenics. Such persons are undesirable as individuals, and dangerous to the community, owing to the practical certainty that they will propagate their kind if unchecked. They are subjected to surveillance and annoyance if they refuse to emigrate. Considerable facilities are afforded to tempt them to go, and agents of the College who are settled in the nearer towns to which they are most likely to drift, are prepared to take charge of them on their arrival. Their passage out is paid, small sums are granted to them at first, on the condition of their never returning to Kantsaywhere. They must renounce in writing all its privileges before being allowed the cost of deportation. Not a few of these persons do well enough especially when the principal reason of their rejection is some hereditary taint, and not personal feebleness. As regards the insane and mentally defective, suitable places for their life segregation are maintained in Kantsaywhere. With so small and eugenic a population, the cases are few and easily dealt with. " The Regulations printed in the Calendar confirmed the view I had already formed, that the propagation of children by the Unfit is looked upon by the inhabitants of Kantsaywhere as a crime to the State. The people are not misled by the specious argument that there is no certainty whether the anticipations of their unfitness will be verified in any particular case and the individual risk may be faced. They look on the community as a whole and know the results of unfit marriages with statistical certainty, which differs little from absolute certainty whenever large numbers are concerned. For instance, they say 1000 unfit couples will assuredly produce a number of children that can be specified within narrow limits, of each grade of unfitness, though they cannot foretell whether these children will be the offspring of A, B, C or X. This same statistical certainty forms a large part of the foundation of laws and penalties in every part of the world. There are many grades of expected unfitness, ranging from, that of the offspring of the idiots, the insane and the feeble-minded, at the lower end of the scale of civic worth, to whom the propagation of offspring is peremptorily forbidden, whether it be by forcible segregation or other strong measures, up to the moderate unfitness expected in the offspring of parents who rank only a little below the average in eugenic worth. The methods of penalizing, taken in the order of their severity, are social disapprobation, fine, excommunication as by boycott, deportation, and life-long segregation. The degree of restriction varies from the limitation of the offspring of unfit parents to a small number, up to its total prohibition. They say that limitation of families is now a recognised institution among most of the cultured and many of the artisan and labouring classes in Europe and America, and there is no reason why a sentence demanding it for the protection of the nation should not be passed, and the infraction of that sentence punished as a criminal act. As regards fines, if the defaulter cannot pay them, he is treated with severity as a bankrupt debtor to the State, being placed in a Labour Colony with hard work and hard fare until it is considered that he has purged his debt. With so small a population as the 10,000 of Kantsaywhere, and with the general high level of breed of its inhabitants, the cases of marked unfitness are not sufficiently numerous to require formal classification in different asylums. They can be more or less individually dealt with by the Board of Penalties. "The difficulty must again be discussed here, relating to the introduction of unfit immigrants. Municipal laws have been enacted, that are quite as severe as those in America and elsewhere, to exclude impecunious immigrants, but they are enacted here for the purpose of excluding the immigration of the constitutionally unfit into Kantsaywhere. Ships, as already mentioned, are only allowed to disembark their passengers subject to the fulfilment of certain accepted conditions. If unfulfilled, the ship-owners are obliged to convey them back to whence they came. Registered medical men are established at the principal ports from which immigrants arrive, whose certificate that a person has passed the ordinary test for fitness in body and mind is accepted. It exempts them from the somewhat more severe and tedious examination of which I have already spoken, which is conducted in a building attached to the Custom House and must be successfully gone through before they are allowed to disembark even for a short residence. They are required later on to pass the Poll examination which allows them to become citizens of Kantsaywhere. "The grades of unfitness on the part of those who are married are determined by the number of their joint marks. Immigrant parents both of whom have received positive marks at the Poll examination may keep their children with them, but not otherwise.
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