The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are busy upon their propaganda of “repopulation,” and are encouraging the production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of the elimination of the feeble-minded.  In this, however, the politicians are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more numerously to propagate their kind.  “With the very highest motives,” declares Dr. Walter E. Fernald, “modern philanthropic efforts often tend to foster and increase the growth of defect in the community....  The only feeble-minded persons who now receive any official consideration are those who have already become dependent or delinquent, many of whom have already become parents.  We lock the barn-door after the horse is stolen.  We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented by the feeble-minded persons at large in the community.”

How the feeble-minded and their always numerous progeny run the gamut of police, alms-houses, courts, penal institutions, “charities and corrections,” tramp shelters, lying-in hospitals, and relief afforded by privately endowed religious and social agencies, is shown in any number of reports and studies of family histories.  We find cases of feeble-mindedness and mental defect in the reports on infant mortality referred to in a previous chapter, as well as in other reports published by the United States government.  Here is a typical case showing the astonishing ability to “increase and multiply,” organically bound up with delinquency and defect of various types: 

“The parents of a feeble-minded girl, twenty years of age, who was committed to the Kansas State Industrial Farm on a vagrancy charge, lived in a thickly populated Negro district which was reported by the police to be the headquarters for the criminal element of the surrounding State....  The mother married at fourteen, and her first child was born at fifteen.  In rapid succession she gave birth to sixteen live-born children and had one miscarriage.  The first child, a girl, married but separated from her husband....  The fourth, fifth and sixth, all girls, died in infancy or early childhood.  The seventh, a girl, remarried after the death of her husband, from whom she had been separated.  The eighth, a boy who early in life began to exhibit criminal tendencies, was in prison for highway robbery and burglary.  The ninth, a girl, normal mentally, was in quarantine at the Kansas State Industrial Farm at the time this study was made; she had lived with a man as his common-law wife, and