The question concerning the proportionate rate of natural increase among all classes of society is one which provides one of the fundamentals upon which Dr Chapple has based his proposal. Instead of enquiring into the actualities of this question he has assumed them, and from his assumption proceeded to his result. His assumption that the better classes use preventive means which the inferior classes do not use, is open to challenge; that there might exist among the inferior classes causes peculiar to these classes which militate against their increasing naturally, he has failed to notice. There do exist such, and so potent as to disprove entirely his statement that the problem is one for the solution of which we must search deep down in biological truth. The true solution will not be found in biological truth but in sociological truth, and there fairly near the surface.
As Dr Chapple's evidence entirely fails, the conclusions of expert criminologists must be accepted, viz., that criminals are characteristically unproductive, and that, among male criminals, the celibates are in a large majority. As, from these reasons, the vast majority of criminals cannot be the descendants of a criminal ancestry, obviously tubo-ligature will not meet the case.
So far indeed the criminal descendant from criminal stock has alone been considered, whereas a large number of criminals have come from a drunken or from a pauper ancestry. Statistics indicate that 33 per cent. of criminals come from an intemperate ancestry and 2 per cent. from a pauper one. But in both cases, environment has a great deal more to be held responsible for than has heredity. It is the conditions of the home life which make the drunkard's child a criminal, and the same applies with equal force to the pauper's child. So that, if drastic measures are to be taken with these classes, surely such measures will proceed gradually from the mean to the extreme, and severe measures will not be employed until milder ones have failed. Where the question is one of environment it is the man's character and habits which have to be dealt with and not his nature. Environment is always capable of modification, and, when improved, the result is invariably a beneficial one for those concerned. So that the least that may be said for the criminal descendants of drunken ancestors is that a better way exists and should, by all moral laws, be first adopted.