igence unable to grasp the wider relations of life, and
concentrated on the gratification of petty and immediate desires. Thus
it happens that the cunning of criminals is frequently associated with
almost inconceivable stupidity.[35]

Closely related to the great feeble-minded class, and from time to time
falling into crime, are the inmates of workhouses, tramps, and the
unemployable. The so-called "able-bodied" inmates of the workhouses are
frequently found, on medical examination, to be, in more than fifty per
cent cases, mentally defective, equally so whether they are men or
women. Tramps, by nature and profession, who overlap the workhouse
population, and are estimated to number 20,000 to 30,000 in England and
Wales, when the genuine unemployed are eliminated, are everywhere found
to be a very degenerate class, among whom the most mischievous kinds of
feeble-mindedness and mental perversion prevail. Inebriates, the people
who are chronically and helplessly given to drink, largely belong to the
same great family, and do not so much become feeble-minded because they
drink, but possess the tendency to drink because they have a strain of
feeble-mindedness from birth. Branthwaite, the chief English authority
on this question, finds that of the inebriates who come to his notice,
putting aside altogether the group of actually insane persons, about
sixty-three per cent are mentally defective, and scarcely more than a
third of the whole number of average mental capacity. It is evident that
these people, even if restored to sobriety, would still retain their
more or less inborn defectiveness, and would remain equally, unfit to
become the parents of the coming generation.

These are the kind of people--tramps, prostitutes, paupers, criminals,
inebriates, all tending to be born a little defective--who largely make
up the great degenerate families whose histories are from time to time
recorded. Such a family was that of the Jukes in America, who, in the
course of five generations, by constantly intermarrying with bad stocks,
produced 709 known descendants who were on the whole unfit for society,
and have been a constant danger and burden to society.[36] A still larger
family of the same kind, more recently studied in Germany, consisted of
834 known persons, all descended from a drunken vagabond woman, probably
somewhat feeble-minded but physically vigorous. The great majority of
these descendants were prostitutes, tramps, pauper