s
will not survive the temptations of freedom. To what extent,
therefore, can education modify the individual? The answer is to be
sought in the problems of heredity and degeneration.

The human degenerate is essentially different from the animal
degenerate. The latter is solely a physical product, and by losing
certain organs is better fitted for survival, as parasites and snakes.

Human degenerates, however, do not form a new type, but are on the
decline to extinction. They are those who lack personality; that is,
they are not moulded into harmony with a social environment which
unfolds self-consciousness. They are strictly biological only when
they are congenital and therefore not educable. They are social
degenerates when they are the product of a degraded education. Both
factors are radical. A born idiot can never be other than an idiot. On
the other hand, the deprivation during childhood and youth of language
and education, as shown by Caspar Hauser, or the wolf-boy of Agra, or
the experiment of Emperor Akbar, leaves the normal natural endowments
as idiotic as though they never existed. The two factors vary
independently through all degrees. Education ranges from the slums to
the pure firesides. The congenital equipment varies from the idiot to
the genius.

The relative weight of these two factors is a matter of statistics.
Absolutely speaking, heredity is everything; relatively, its social
significance depends upon the actual proportion of abnormal to normal
births.

The highest estimate I am able to make of the total number of
degenerates, both born and induced, is five and one-half per cent of
the population, as follows:

ESTIMATED TOTAL OF DEFECTIVES PER MILLION POPULATION.

Census estimate (1890).

Insane 1,697
Feeble-minded 1,526
Deaf and Dumb 659
Blind 805
Prisoners 1,315
Juvenile delinquents 237
Almshouse paupers 1,166
-----
7,405
Outdoor Criminals (five times the number of inmates) 7,760
Tramps (McCook, 1895, New Haven Confer