Memoranda presented to the Royal Commission.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on Population
Date:
1950
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoranda presented to the Royal Commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    54/128 page 48
    it is not surprising that the cumulative effect of this differential fertility should be a deterioration in the intelligence of the community as a whole. What is rather surprising, however, is that the effect has become manifest in such a comparatively short period of two or three generations. But this fact should raise our hopes and stimulate the nation to action, because if the present trend of differential fertility was reversed the mental calibre of the nation could be improved generally in a few generations. One of the most definite findings of our investigation was that the incidence of mental defect was decidedly higher, approximately 50 per cent. in rural than in urban areas. This finding throws some interesting light upon what social changes may affect the quality of a population. This disparity in the incidence of mental defect in town and country appears to be one of the by-products of the great and rapid trend towards urbanisation that began about a hundred years ago in this country and has not yet ceased. At the middle of the last century the total rural population of England and Wales exceeded that of the urban population; at present the urban population is five times as large as the rural. It was but natural that the more intelligent and progressive members of the rural communities should be the first to appreciate.the economic advantages offered by the industrial centres and therefore these members formed a large proportion of the migrating population. The cumulative result of this in many rural districts was to leave a residual population of poor mentality in these dis- tricts. In such communities it is inevitable that the incidence of mental defect should become high and that the mental endowments of the majority of the children should ‘be below the average for the country as a whole. It is well to emphasise that whatever increase there has been in the incidence of mental deficiency has occurred mostly in rural districts and not in towns, and that it has been due to the operation of selective genetical factors and not to deleterious industrial conditions, In parentheses, | may add that our findings give a denial to any sweeping generalisation that rusticity is synonymous with mental inferiority. The level of intelligence in some villages, judged by the results obtained with group tests given to the schoolchildren, compared very favourably with that of urban populations. In these rural districts it seems that the more intelligent members have resisted the attractions of the towns and that the less intelligent and efficient members have been forced to seek occupation elsewhere. In each of the six areas we investigated we found that the mentally defective were very unevenly distributed. Im the rural areas many small villages had several defectives whilst in others there were none. In the towns the large majority of defectives resided in slum areas. Our experience agrees with that of American investigators in this field of work, namely, that the mentally defective are to be found in small “pockets” which are unevenly distributed throughout the country. A detailed study of some of these “pockets” enabled my colleagues and myself to appreciate the significance of mental deficiency as a social problem. We found that, with few exceptions, the other members of the families with mental defectives were persons with poor mental endowments. For every single mental defective there were usually three or more other members of the family who could be described as “dull”. In a discussion on the quality of a population attention should be focused not so much upon the mentally defective, but on this much larger borderline group. From the genetic stand- point the marriage of the “dull” girl with the “dull” lad is the crux of the problem.
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