May a physician employed by the State in a prison, an institution for the feeble-minded, or a like place, do vasectomy at the command of the law? Certainly he may not, except in those rare cases where vasectomy is permissible as described above.
The advocates of freakish legislation harp on the assertion that insanity and imbecility are increasing alarmingly, and as a consequence the entire nation is degenerating. To cure this evil we are to mutilate certain criminals and the mentally defective. It is not true that insanity and mental imbecility are increasing in a very marked degree in the United States. The number of inhabitants in this country is increasing rapidly, and as there are more people here than there were a few years ago, the number of the insane and the mentally defective has increased _pari passu_, but the percentage does not increase to any degree that calls for immoral and ineffective legislation. Only of late years have the State governments begun to classify, diagnose, and gather up the insane and the imbecile, whom we always have had with us, and these processes have brought the defectives into the light.
Our late immigrants are not equal in race, in mental and moral strength, to the old northern European immigrants. In Philadelphia the foreign-born population is 24.7 per cent. of the whole, but that foreign-born population gives us 44 per cent. of the indigent insane. In New York State 27 per cent. of the registered insane are not American citizens. What we need here is not sterilization, but a better control of the immigrant, a keeping out of the unfit. Again, our insanity percentage is increased avoidably by the undoubted increase of insanity among negroes. We are accountable for this because we do not care for our helpless negroes. These people are prevented by trades-unions from learning and working at elevating trades, and they are thus forced unjustly into a poverty and degradation which lead to vice and mental deterioration. The cure is not a jail surgeon's scalpel, evidently.
A system of education that ignores the will, upon which morality and virtue are based, and substitutes a sham intellectuality as elaborated by ignorant boards of education and administered by emotional, half-educated women, together with a lack of genuine religion, is a prolific source of mental and moral deterioration and consequent degeneracy in the physical and moral orders. Our American public-school system is such, and its deity is the unwashed and crassly depraved god Demos, whose bible is the evening newspaper. If we could civilize our schools, we should have no mention of legislation by vagary.