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While defectives are more apt to commit crimes, in the main this is because their environment is too hard for their machine. The sub-normal are probably more tractable and less disposed to the emotions that lead to criminal acts than are the more intelligent. Their crimes are especially noticed because they seem to be without any serious motive and often shockingly brutal.
"That pallor is stunning," said a big, ruddy youth, with sunburn on his neck and forehead. "It isn't healthy," said Fleetwood. "It attracts me," persisted the ruddy young man, voicing naively that curious truth concerning the attraction that disease so often exerts on health the strange curiosity the normal has for the sub-normal that fascination of the wholesome for the unhealthy.
It might appear then that the best results would come from the provision, say, of five types of schools providing respectively for the 2 per cent, of greatest natural cleverness, the succeeding 10 per cent., the intermediate 76 per cent., the comparatively sub-normal 10 per cent., and the 2 per cent, of 'mentally deficient. That is to say the local authority would have to provide in that proportion Secondary, Higher Grade, Ordinary, Sub-Normal, and Mentally Deficient schools.
In the nature of the case, fifty per cent. of the public must be sub-normal, that is, youthful mentality. We have reached down to the level of nonsense for our guide. That is why we call it in this book the nonsenseorship. Every one who has watched the growth of a child's vocabulary has observed that it learns to say "no," many months, perhaps more than a year, before it ever says "yes."
But, plainly, any such detached line of magnates, notables, kings and mandarins, resting their notability on nothing more substantial than a slightly sub-normal intelligence and a moderately scrofulous habit of body could not long continue to command that eager deference that is accounted their due. Such a picture of majesty would be sadly out of drawing.
The great masses of men are rather mediocre, and those above and below are exceptions. This depends on how broad is the class included in the normal. There are no sharp divisions anywhere; above, the normal shades imperceptibly into those of unusual intelligence, and below it fades just as gradually into the sub-normal.
One of the saddest elements in our consultation work is the stream of both men and women who lack courage, aggressiveness, initiative, mental focus, and personal efficiency generally because they are deficient in physical stamina. Their whole life is, as it were, sub-normal.
Sub-normal as he now was in nervous strength and tension, he shrank from having it out with Ellis. But he felt, for the first time in his life, forlorn and friendless. On his part McGuire Ellis brooded over a deep anger. He was not a man to yield lightly of his best; but he had given to Hal, first a fine loyalty, and later, as they grew into closer association, a warm if rather reticent affection.
City life most readily uncovers the sub-normal. This is true because the strain is far greater in the city than the country. There are exceptions to this rule, particularly those portions of the country that are barren and unproductive territory into which the venturesome and obvious unfits are drawn. The prisons are not the only places which are inhabited by the sub-normal and the misfit.
A general examination of all men to discover the defective and the sub-normal, coupled with a demand that all such be sent to some place of confinement, would meet with such a protest from all classes seriously affected as to end not only the demand but the further agitation of the subject.