30 THE TREND OF THE RACE 



superficially bright, many of the moron class pass for people 

 of average intelligence; or at least they do not attract general 

 attention on account of their inferior intellect. This class con- 

 stitutes a considerable proportion of human beings who being 

 unable to support themselves are apt to become a public burden. 

 It furnishes the criminal class with a considerable proportion . of 

 its recruits, and it supplies a large number of prostitutes, a class 

 which recent studies have shown to contain a high percentage of 

 mentally inferior women. 



The feeble-minded tend to marry their own kind, or to produce 

 children without the ceremony of marriage. In cities they tend 

 to drift into association with vicious and criminal elements of the 

 community and are often led into vice and crime more through 

 inherent weakness of intellect and will than natural depravity of 

 their own. In the country they frequently segregate into com- 

 munities, where there is often intermarriage of related stocks 

 which brings forth the latent defects of both sides. Such rural 

 communities are characterized by poverty, alcoholism, sexual 

 immorality and crime. The histories of several notorious feeble- 

 minded families have been followed in recent years and they have 

 yielded results of much interest and importance to students of 

 social problems. One of the most noteworthy of these instances 

 forms the subject-matter of Goddard's fascinating book, The 

 Kallikak Family. The starting point of the investigation de- 

 scribed in this book was made in the effort to trace the ancestry of 

 a feeble-minded girl, Deborah, who had become an inmate of a 

 home for the feeble-minded at Vineland, N. J. Deborah had been 

 born in the almshouse. Her mother was feeble-minded and had 

 had several other children by various men. The field worker, 

 Miss E. S. Kite, who worked out the genealogy of the Kallikak 

 family, succeeded in tracing its ancestry to a Martin Kallikak, a 

 soldier in the revolutionary war. While at an inn Martin Kalli- 

 kak made the acquaintance of a feeble-minded girl by whom he 

 had a son named Martin Kallikak, Jr. Later Martin Kallikak 

 married a normal woman of good family and raised several chil- 

 dren. "All of the legitimate children of Martin, Sr., married into 



