s, and criminals (some
of them murderers), and the direct cost in money to the Prussian State
for the keep and care of this woman and her family has been a quarter of
a million pounds. Yet another such family is that of the "Zeros." Three
centuries ago they were highly respectable people, living in a Swiss
valley. But they intermarried with an insane stock, and subsequently
married other women of an unbalanced nature. In recent times 310 members
of this family have been studied, and it is found that vagrancy,
feeble-mindedness, mental troubles, criminality, pauperism, immorality
are, as it may be termed, their patrimony.[37]

These classes, with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn
laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity,
contain the people who complain that they are starving for want of work,
though they will never perform any work that is given them.
Feeble-mindedness is an absolute dead-weight on the race. It is an evil
that is unmitigated. The heavy and complicated social burdens and
injuries it inflicts on the present generation are without compensation,
while the unquestionable fact that in any degree it is highly
inheritable renders it a deteriorating poison to the race; it
depreciates the quality of a people. The task of Social Hygiene which
lies before us cannot be attempted by this feeble folk. Not only can
they not share it, but they impede it; their clumsy hands are for ever
becoming entangled in the delicate mechanism of our modern civilization.
Their very existence is itself an impediment. Apart altogether from the
gross and obvious burden in money and social machinery which the
protection they need, and the protection we need against them, casts
upon the community,[38] they dilute the spiritual quality of the
community to a degree which makes it an inapt medium for any high
achievement. It matters little how small a city or a nation is, provided
the spirit of its people is great. It is the smallest communities that
have most powerfully and most immortally raised the level of
civilization, and surrounded the human species (in its own eyes) with a
halo of glory which belongs to no other species. Only a handful of
people, hemmed in on every side, created the eternal radiance of Athens,
and the fame of the little city of Florence may outlive that of the
whole kingdom of Italy. To realize this truth in the future of
civilization is one of the first tasks of Social Hygiene.[3