SURVIVAL OF THE UNFITTEST: Sheffield, June 3, 1910. Sir, — Your correspondent “Behosh” entirely misunderstands the object of the “Defective Schools” so-called, and still more of the proposed legislation for the care and (especially) segregation of adult defectives. It is not by protecting and as far may be, educating the imbecile and epileptic that we “aid the bad in multiplying.” If “Behosh” had heard the admirable lecture of Mrs. Hume Pinsent on “The Care of the Feeble-minded.” or had read with comprehension the report of the subsequent meeting of the Education Committee, at which the subject was discussed, he would see that the urgent demand of all experts on this painful question is that the mentally deficient, instead of being (as at present) educated, up to the age of 16, and then set adrift in the world to relapse into hopeless imbecility and reproduce their kind, should be segregated in homes or colonies under strict and kindly supervision — not for a time, but for life. In this way the defective can be trained to be at all events partly self-supporting, and what is of far more importance — prevented from “bequeathing to posterity an increasing population of imbeciles and idlers and criminals.” Herbert Spencer is not Gospel, and if by “fools” meant imbeciles (but perhaps he did not), he never wrote anything more untrue and mischievous than that “the result of shielding men from the effect of folly is to fill the world with fools.” The exact reverse is the case. The effect of unshielded folly, as every social student knows, is to fill the asylums with idiots, the gaols with (often irresponsible) criminals, the streets with unfortunates and the hospitals with patients. All these have to be paid for, and the protection of the fool from his own misfortune must in the long run result in economy to the rates and the “benefit of the healthy community:” — Yours, etc., CORNELIA
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Referenced
GRO0245 Devonport: Ellen Frances Parker: 1866 – 1949