ence of Charities
and Correction, 85,768) 1,308
Drunkards (Crothers, 1893, Chicago Conference, 1,200,000,
equal to about 10 per cent of voting population) 19,000
Prostitutes (weighted average of Levasseur's estimate for
rural (600) and urban (11,200 to 17,200) France, in
"La Population Francaise," vol. ii, p. 434) 5,000
Outdoor Paupers (weighted average of report at Nashville
Conference, 1894, 46 per cent in Penna. to 2.2 per cent
in N. Y.) 15,000
------
55,473

This estimate would make the maximum number of all degenerates 5.54
per cent of the population. From these must be deducted those who are
not congenital. We can estimate the congenitals by three methods: by
statistics of _atavism_, or _consanguinity_, and by _experiment_.

In the statistics of atavism we add together the physical
abnormalities of the individual, assuming that a criminal type is
found when these abnormalities reach the number of three or more. The
statistical method always suffers the limitation that it indicates not
identity, but probability. Yet it has an important value, provided it
discovers ratios of probability which concur. This is not the case in
the method by atavism. Sixty to seventy per cent of criminals do not
belong to the assumed criminal type; and sixteen per cent of normal
males are classed as criminals, whereas the actual number is less than
three per cent of the males of criminal age. (See Lombroso, "The
Female Offender," pp. 104, 105.)

While atavism itself is unquestioned, this method seizes upon rigid
physical characters to measure educable qualities. And where the
latter are themselves abnormal the causes may lie with education and
not heredity.

The method by consanguinity seeks not the abnormalities of the patient
himself, but the signs of disease and degeneracy in his blood
relatives. It therefore greatly increases the apparent weight of
heredity, for it collects symptoms from several individuals instead of
one. The medical authorities ascribe fifty to eighty per cent of
inebriety to heredity. This method fails as does the other, for, as
seen in the Jukes or the drunkard, the child gets both its heredity
and its education from the same degrade