defective blood is continuously reinforced by strong, if vicious, blood from outside its own ranks. Probably if the idiotic, insane, epileptic and feeble-minded could be deported and placed together on an island in the Pacific and left to themselves, the degenerate race would die out in two or three generations. The mothers of most of the next generation of feeble-minded and idiotic are such themselves; but most of the fathers are strong-minded. This is the most powerful argument that I know of, for the protection of the feeble-minded from the passions of vicious men and from the effects of their own weakness.

I do not present to you anything in the nature of an academic discussion. I desire to offer an exceedingly practical proposition. There is a certain positive piece of state business to be done by the American people with regard to the degenerate classes. I believe it is well within the power of the people of each state to do that state's share. I admit that it is a tremendous piece of work, but we are not afraid of large undertakings.

This is an era of big things being done. We take a few miles of sand dunes by the lake side and transform them in a year or two into a city of 100,000 people surrounding a steel plant which manufactures many million dollars' worth of steel annually. We have no doubt of our ability to do any big thing that ought to be done.

The feeble-minded, idiotic and insane, or certain classes of them, are certainly vitiating and lowering the average standard of the race. The total number of them is not so large as we sometimes fear. Of the epileptics we have a pretty accurate estimate. About one in 500 of the population in Europe, and in America the number is very nearly the same, or one-fifth of one per cent of the population, are epileptics. The feeble-minded we have not so accurately estimated, but I think the number is about the same, perhaps not quite so many. Many of the epileptic are also feeble-minded. Many are strong-minded. Julius Cæsar, Mahomet, Napoleon Bonaparte were supposed to be, and perhaps were, epileptic.

Of the insane the number is not far different. I think if we could count the insane, the epileptic and the feeble-minded we should find the total to be not more than one-half or two-thirds of one per cent of the total population, surely not a number to inspire terror in the strong-minded remainder.

Add to this number the weak, shiftless people always on the verge of pauperism and continually falling over into it, especially the numerous mothers of illegitimate children, women so nearly feeble-minded that you are not quite certain whether or not they should be detained in custody, who, under our wretched pauper system, or want of system, are continually in and out of the almshouses, coming in pregnant, bearing a child, going out leaving the child behind, and coming back soon again in the same condition, clearly degenerate, evidently hopeless, the mothers of the Jukes and their like.

Still, with all these added, the total would not be so tremendous, not more than we can handle, and we do something with them now. Our present inefficient semi-neglect of them is costly. For their own sake and that of the body politic we ought to take some positive method to control the whole class and to make their reproduction impossible. For it seems certain that, unhindered, their natural increase, since it is not affected by the restraints of prudence and self-control, is more rapid than that of the general body of normal citizens.

Four remedies have been offered for the increase of the degen

erates:

First, restrictive marriage laws. A few states restrict the marriages of insane and idiots. I know only one which goes so far as to control the feeble-minded and epileptic. That is Connecticut. But the laws are not heeded to any great extent. I think if the laws in regard to idiocy were carried out further, and if the general public could be educated up to the point of view of those who have studied the subject, as to the exceeding horror and odiousness of such a marriage, they might have some effect. But restrictive marriage laws have never been largely successful. The typical instances have been those of Austria and Sweden, each of which countries tried to diminish poverty by such laws. The net results were a great increase in immorality and in the number of illegitimate births. In this country, as elsewhere, many of the degenerates are born outside the marriage bond.

McKim in his book on "Heredity and Social Progress" declares we must eliminate the degenerate by a humane and painless death-have same pleasant lethal chamber into which they may be introduced, lie down to happy dreams and never waken. It is not

worth while discussing that, not even as an academic discussion, it is so tremendously far away. What the results would be I do not like to contemplate. What horrible degradation would ensue; what desperate changes in human character would result; how far down we would go toward or below the morals of Greece and Rome when the citizen was nothing and the state everything. I do not propose to argue that question before you.

The next plan is of the same kind, but differs in degree,sterilization. I do not care to discuss that either. It also would be nothing but an academic discussion. Those who propose it, propose it for the people from whom there is or should be the least danger, the incorrigible criminals, who certainly should be retained in custody for life, and the hopeless idiot. In my own state, Indiana, I am ashamed to say, an ingenious method of sterilization has been introduced which would seem to foster and encourage sensuality by promising immunity from some of the dangers which usually attend it. I consider it a most serious and dangerous attack on public morals. It has been introduced by people who are entirely well-meaning and who would not wittingly do anything against religion and ethics. I regret that it is becoming popular and that people in other states desire to copy it. When I talk against it I feel like the voice of one crying in the wilderness, or like that Wisdom which, we are told, cries aloud on the streets and no man regardeth her.

I think these plans are futile. I think neither restrictive marriage laws, elimination by a painless death, nor wholesale sterilization can be applied, at any rate within the next generation or two, so as to have any serious effect in the reduction of the number of the degenerate classes. But I think a process can be applied, and is now being applied, partially, in many states, with remarkable success, that is entirely within our power to apply thoroughly. I think that the whole class of the feeble-minded and the epileptic, say two-fifths of one per cent of the whole population, may be at once segregated and taken into permanent, maternal care by the good Mother State. I think that such care can be exercised upon them as will not only make their miserable lives much less miserable than they are, but make most of them positively happy. It is quite possible and practicable to establish, in every state in the Union, orderly celibate communities, segregated from the body politic;

set off by themselves on land selected for the purpose, in buildings constructed to some extent by their own hands, where the feebleminded people, and the epileptic people, and the chronically insane people may be cared for permanently, and a large part of them made entirely self-supporting. I do not know how large a part are capable of self-support under due control. A friend of mine who had charge of a large institution in which he had been successfully treating feeble-minded and epileptics, used to say eighty per cent of the total number could be made self-supporting. I thought his claim rather too high. But from my own experience I am confident that sixty per cent of the total number of the feeble-minded could be made self-supporting. What does it mean-self-supporting. It does not mean that a feeble-minded man can do a full ordinary man's work. If so, he would be three times self-supporting. Any man, given steady work, in a civilized community, can earn a living for himself, his wife and his family. He can surely earn the living in a moderate way of three adults. Therefore if my insane, epileptic or feeble-minded laborer does one-third of one man's work, or just enough over a third to pay for the extra supervision he requires because he is feeble-minded, then he is entitled to be called and he is, a self-supporting member of the community. I have had hundreds of such people under my care. I am going to tell you of just one group of such laborers, out of many instances of which I know, because I want to clinch my argument with some facts of experience.

I discovered on our colony farm, two miles away from the main institution, that we had an extensive deposit of excellent brick clay. Now, feeble-minded and epileptic people, properly managed, are usually willing workers, and I was always on the lookout for industries for those in my charge. I did not know any more about making bricks than the ordinary man, but I began in a cheap and tentative way and gradually increased the plant until I had a brickyard which employed twenty-seven to thirty feebleminded boys, ages eighteen to thirty years, working under two strong-minded men. We turned out, for several years, a million bricks annually. They were worth $5.00 per thousand, and they cost the state about $2.00 per thousand to make.

Among the brickmakers were five or six of those we call high-grade imbeciles, boys with whom you might have to converse

for five minutes before you could discover their defectiveness. There were a dozen or more of the middle-grade and eight or nine idiots who could not talk at all, but could earn their living shoveling clay into a wagon.

Now, in the simple homely fashion in which we lived on that farm, clad in summer in blue denim and in winter in any kind of warm clothes no matter how patched, if clean, fed on simple wholesome food and plenty of it, with no ostentation nor extravagance for inmates or care-takers, the gross cost of the support of these boys was only $110.00 per annum per capita. But when we deducted from that $110.00 the value of the hay, milk, potatoes, pork, apples and other farm products, raised on the colony farm and sent down to the parent institution, the net cost was only $69.00 per capita. The thirty brick-makers earned $3,000 in the brickmaking season of eight months, which was considerably more than their net cost for a year.

We could easily have sold all the bricks we made at a higher price than I have quoted above, but instead we held them until the legislature helped us to put them into houses to receive more imbeciles.

As to the produce of our gardens and orchards, when we had more than we could use in the colony or at the parent institution, with its 1,000 inmates and 200 employees, we had good customers for our surplus in the other state institutions which were not so favorably situated, without invading the usual arteries of commerce.

Now, farm life and labor is but one of the many available industries for the feeble-minded, insane and epileptic. The great institutions for the latter at Bielefeld, Germany, and Sonyea, N. Y., have shown that there are abundant possibilities of profitable occupation for every one of them.

The class of defectives that has the strongest appeal to our sympathies is that of the feeble-minded women. When we neglect them we are exposing them to dreadful danger. Women physically, they are only babies in intellect and self-control. We say to these children, not in words but in deeds, as we say to many of the normal children of the slums: "You must be virtuous. Virtue requires strength, for it means choosing the right and rejecting the wrong. You have only strength enough to be innocent, but you shall be virtuous or you shall be damned." Now, the feeble-minded