pulation. In Germany Bonhoeffer found among 190 prostitutes who passed
through a prison that 102 were hereditarily degenerate and 53
feeble-minded. This would be an over-estimate as regards average
prostitutes, though the offences were no doubt usually trivial, but in
any case the association between prostitution and feeble-mindedness is
intimate. Everywhere, there can be no doubt, the ranks of prostitution
contain a considerable proportion of women who were, at the very outset,
in some slight degree feeble-minded, mentally and morally a little
blunted through some taint of inheritance.[34]

Criminality, again, is associated with feeble-mindedness in the most
intimate way. Not only do criminals tend to belong to large families,
but the families that produce feeble-minded offspring also produce
criminals, while a certain degree of feeble-mindedness is extremely
common among criminals, and the most hopeless and typical, though
fortunately rare, kind of criminal, frequently termed a "moral
imbecile," is nothing more than a feeble-minded person whose defect is
shown not so much in his intelligence as in his feelings and his
conduct. Sir H.B. Donkin, who speaks with authority on this matter,
estimates that, though it is difficult to obtain the early history of
the criminals who enter English prisons, about twenty per cent of them
are of primarily defective mental capacity. This would mean that every
year some 35,000 feeble-minded persons are sent to English prisons as
"criminals." The tendency of criminals to belong to the feeble-minded
class is indeed every day becoming more clearly recognized. At
Pentonville, putting aside prisoners who were too mentally affected to
be fit for prison discipline, eighteen per cent of the adult prisoners
and forty per cent of the juvenile offenders were found to be
feeble-minded. This includes only those whose defect is fairly obvious,
and is not the result of methodical investigation. It is certain that
such methodical inquiry would reveal a very large proportion of cases of
less obvious mental defect. Thus the systematic examination of a number
of delinquent children in an Industrial School showed that in
seventy-five per cent cases they were defective as compared to normal
children, and that their defectiveness was probably inborn. Even the
possession of a considerable degree of cunning is no evidence against
mental defect, but may rather be said to be a sign of it, for it shows
an intell