The law of the struggle for existence, _i.e._, the law of Justice is suspended or modified, and the unfit are allowed to live, or at least allowed to live a little longer, long enough indeed to propagate their kind.
Hospitals and Homes and Charitable institutions all combine their energies, and direct their efforts to nurture those whom the laws of nature decree should die.
Sympathy and not indignation is aroused when a defective is born, and the result of all the effort which that sympathy evokes is that the little weakling and thousands such are safely led and tended all the way to the child-bearing period of life, only to repeat their history, in others.
Not only do defects "run in families," but they run in groups, and a physical defect such as club-foot, cleft palate, or any arrested development, is apt to be associated with some mental defect, and it is the mental more than the physical defects of individuals that prevent them being self-supporting helpful members of society.
In the "North American Review" for August, 1903, Sir John Gorst declares that:-- "The condition of disease, debility, and defective sight and hearing, in the public elementary schools in poorer districts, is appalling.

The research of a recent Royal Commission has disclosed that of the children in the public schools of Edinburgh, 70 per cent, are suffering from disease of some kind, more than half from defective vision, nearly half from defective hearing, and 30 per cent, from starvation.

The physical deterioration of the recruits who offer themselves for the army is a subject of increasing concern.

There are grounds for at least suspecting a growing degeneracy of the population of the United Kingdom, particularly in the great towns." The following table gives the charges before Magistrates in our Courts:-- Year.

Proportion per thousand of mean population.
1894 24.76 1897 26.87 1898 29.42 1899 29.48 1900 31.54 1901 33.20 1902 35.19 Now who are the unfit?
Are they more fertile than the fit?
and do they propagate their kind?
The following defects constitute their victims members of that great class of degenerates who are unfit to procreate healthy normal offspring.