(6) Cf.  Tredgold:  Inheritance and Educability.  Eugenics
     Review, Vol.  Xiii, No.  I, pp. 839 et seq.

     (7) Cf.  New York Times, June 4, 1921.

     (8) “Studies in the Psychology of Sex,” Vol.  VI. p. 20.

CHAPTER IV:  The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded

     What vesture have you woven for my year? 
     O Man and Woman who have fashioned it
     Together, is it fine and clean and strong,
     Made in such reverence of holy joy,
     Of such unsullied substance, that your hearts
     Leap with glad awe to see it clothing me,
     The glory of whose nakedness you know?

     “The Song of the Unborn”
     Amelia Josephine Burr

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great problem of the feeble-minded.  That is, as the best authorities are agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to their descendants.  Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally high rate of fertility.  Modern conditions of civilization, as we are continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile.  “We protect the members of a weak strain,” says Davenport, “up to the period of reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded’:  which in turn, protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive period, are again set free to reproduce, and so the stupid work goes on of preserving and increasing our socially unfit strains.”

The philosophy of Birth Control points out that as long as civilized communities encourage unrestrained fecundity in the “normal” members of the population—­always of course under the cloak of decency and morality—­and penalize every attempt to introduce the principle of discrimination and responsibility in parenthood, they will be faced with the ever-increasing problem of feeble-mindedness, that fertile parent of degeneracy, crime, and pauperism.  Small as the percentage of the imbecile and half-witted may seem in comparison with the normal members of the community, it should always be remembered that feeble-mindedness is not an unrelated expression of modern civilization.  Its roots strike deep into the social fabric.  Modern studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism, and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific.  Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the next.  There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a feeble-minded peril to future generations—­unless the feeble-minded are prevented from reproducing their kind.  To meet this emergency is the immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities.