Notes.

Abstract

IN reply to a question asked in the House of Commons on Monday, the Prime Minister stated that he feared the Government will not be able to find time to pass the Mental Deficiency Bill this session, but that the Home Secretary hopes to reintroduce the Bill early next session embodying the amendments made by the Standing Committee. The pledge that the Bill would be passed this session is thus held to be of no account. That Parliamentary exigencies should cause the jettisoning of the Bill is greatly to be deplored. Men of science know with a certainty that arises out of their qualifications that the problem of the feeble-minded and mentally deficient does not stand still. Its urgency caused the appointment of the Royal Commission in 1904; the report emphasised the necessity for immediate action in 1908; yet December of 1912 finds the subject shelved and put on one side. The Times has opened its columns to various expressions of feeling on this occasion, but many people who do not see its files will share in Sir Edward Fry's “distress and dismay” at a postponement which is “little short of a national calamity,” and agree with the long list of distinguished signatories in the issue of November 28, that “this neglect is causing untold suffering to thousands of feeble-minded individuals who, because it is impossible under the existing law to train them and care for them, become inebriates, prostitutes, criminals, and paupers.” Nor is it only these persons themselves with whom we need concern ourselves. They leave behind them a new generation of mentally and physically degenerate children, increasing daily in number, to be a shame to our national life, and a menace to our racial superiority.