MENTAL DEFECTIVES AND SOCIAL WELFARE. 747 



gifted," as well as by showing what was once esteemed moral per- 

 version to be moral imbecility; but a truth to which science also 

 attests is, that unstable nerve centers uniting and reacting through 

 successive generations, producing various forms of neuroses, evidenced 

 in insanity, moral and mental imbecility, idiocy and epilepsy, do 

 show the influence of a highly nervous age. 



Our last census reports, although necessarily uncertain and unre- 

 liable, yet show ninety thousand mental defectives, not including 

 the insane. Unrecognized and unacknowledged cases swell the num- 

 ber easily to one hundred thousand within our present borders — how 

 many we are going to annex remains to be seen; but this is an enemy 

 that attacks not our frontiers but our hearthstones. We have 

 reached that point when we must conquer it, lest it should conquer 

 us, and the means to this end may be summed up in three words — - 

 separation, asexualization, and permanent sequestration. " Diseases 

 desperate grown by desperate appliances are relieved, or not at all," 

 and we must recognize that heroic measures now are as essential to 

 the welfare of the unfortunate as to society, which will then naturally 

 adjust itself to new conditions. Viewing the separation and massing 

 of these irresponsibles — innocent victims of ignorance, debauchery, 

 or selfish lust — men will come to realize that a greater crime than 

 taking is the giving of such life; and so a greater reverence for 

 the sacredness of marriage, a deeper sense of the great responsibilities 

 of parenthood, will do more to avert this evil than the most stringent 

 marriage laws. That the present demands some restraint upon the 

 ignorant and the indifferent there can be no doubt, and laws prevent- 

 ing the marriage of defectives and of their immediate descendants 

 would go far to stem the tide of harmful heredity. 



But what to do with those now in our midst is the vital question ! 

 They must be provided for in a way that shall insure safety to society, 

 economy to the State, and protection and happiness to the individual. 

 The answer found in the experience of half a century is, briefly, 

 asylums for the helpless — training schools and colonies for those ca- 

 pable of becoming helpful. These in very name and nature being 

 widely separate, just as separate as titles and names indicate, should 

 be their working systems. AVork among the feeble-minded, a philan- 

 thropic movement directed first toward the idiot, soon found a limit 

 in dealing with a subject not trainable and but slightly if at all im- 

 provable. Thence, diverging and broadening as idiocy became better 

 understood and imbecility in various phases became recognized, it 

 found its true province in strengthening and encouraging feeble in- 

 tellects, arousing and stimulating indolent and weak wills, and in 

 training and directing into healthful channels the abnormal energy 

 of those destitute of the moral sense. How wide the divergence can 



