d, and to a much greater degree
than has hitherto been suspected even by expert authorities, but the
feeble-minded thus tend (though, as Davenport and Weeks have found, not
invariably) to have a larger number of children than normal people. That
indeed, we might expect, apart altogether from the question of any
innate fertility. The feeble-minded have no forethought and no
self-restraint. They are not adequately capable of resisting their own
impulses or the solicitations of others, and they are unable to
understand adequately the motives which guide the conduct of ordinary
people. The average number of children of feeble-minded people seems to
be frequently about one-third more than in normal families, and is
sometimes much greater. Dr. Ettie Sayer, when investigating for the
London County Council the family histories of one hundred normal
families and one hundred families in which mentally defective children
had been found, ascertained that the families of the latter averaged 7.6
children, while in the normal families they averaged 5. Tredgold,
specially investigating 150 feeble-minded cases, found that they
belonged to families in which 1269 children had been born, that is to
say 7.3 per family, or, counting still-born children, 8.4. Nearly
two-thirds of these abnormally large families were mentally defective,
many showing a tendency to disease, pauperism, criminality, or else to
early death.[32]

Here, indeed, we have a counterbalancing influence, for, in the large
families of the feeble-minded, there is a correspondingly large
infantile mortality. A considerable proportion of Tredgold's group of
children were born dead, and a very large number died early. Eichholz,
again, found that, in one group of defective families, about sixty per
cent of the children died young. That is probably an unusually high
proportion, and in Eichholz's cases it seems to have been associated
with very unusually large families, but the infant mortality is always
very high.

This large early mortality of the offspring of the feeble-minded is,
however, very far from settling the question of the disposal of the
mentally defective, or we should not find families of them propagated
from generation to generation. The large number who die early merely
serves, roughly speaking, to reduce the size of the abnormal family to
the size of a normal family, and some authorities consider that it
scarcely suffices to do this, for we must remember that t