Key: Better American Families 



81 



is highly desirable, the impossibility of 

 using them on the majority of the per- 

 sons studied made it inadvisable to use 

 them at all. Moreover, the settled na- 

 ture of the communities where they 

 lived, with a fair sprinkling of intelli- 

 gent historians, gave conditions of opti- 

 mum value for the social test. 



In the latter part of the eighteenth 

 century there came to what was then 

 the western edge of the American fron- 

 tier an immigrant, whom we will desig- 

 nate as Aaron Rufer, with his wife and 

 three small children. He was shrewd, 

 honest, plucky and persevering. He 

 never learned to read or write, but the 

 conditions of his will, which he signed 

 with a cross, show prudence and fore- 

 sight. He acquired 400 acres of fertile 

 land, which he farmed successfully for 

 thirty years. Aaron's wife, Mary, was 

 totally lacking in sense of number or 

 quantity, for before he went to work in 

 the morning he always measured out 

 the proper amount of meat and vege- 

 tables for the family dinner ; that done, 

 Mary could tend the fire until a "sort 

 of meal" was in readiness. Moreover, 

 she could neither sew, spin nor weave 

 acceptably, though she was obliging and 

 faithful to the simple tasks she was able 

 to perform. 



From Aaron and his defective wife 

 were derived seven children, five of 

 whom were traced to the present gen- 

 eration. They are Isaac, faithful, plod- 

 ding, with little ability to plan or cal- 

 culate; Jared, shiftless and dishonest, 

 with little ability to plan or calculate; 

 Stephen, having a fair share of these 

 traits, but non-aggressive, though he 

 persevered in tasks set for him ; and 

 Darius, who resembled Isaac. Dorcas 

 and Herman "didn't know anything at 

 all." In his will, Aaron provides ample 

 means and a guardian for them and 

 "the old woman," the guardian to see 

 that these children did not marry. 

 Dorcas never did, but because Herman 

 had been left a good farm, designing 

 persons arranged a marriage with a 

 feeble-minded, sexually lax girl "in 

 order to give her a home." Their four 

 children were very defective, two did 



not marry, but two married descendants 

 of a couple to be described in the fol- 

 lowing paragraph. 



Thomas and Martha Riel were settled 

 in an adjoining county, where they 

 owned a small farm. Both were very 

 tall and had great physical endurance. 

 Thomas came from a fair family but 

 had certain irresponsible tendencies, 

 which led him to slip away one night, 

 leaving to his wife the care of the farm 

 and their twelve children. The latter, 

 too, were known for their great stature 

 and strength, which in most of them 

 was combined with extreme shyness, 

 good nature and dullness. Two daugh- 

 ters married into stock of varied ca- 

 pacity, and their descendants made alli- 

 ances with those of Aaron and Mary 

 Rufer. Limited space forbids repeti- 

 tion of the anecdotes from which their 

 characteristics have been derived, but 

 stories like the following could be dup- 

 licated many times; Molly Riel, born 

 about 1810, lacking as she was, was still 

 superior to her husband in energy and 

 planfulness, and all that the scanty acres 

 yielded was owing to her. When the 

 census-taker exclaimed at her family 

 of twenty-one children and asked : "Are 

 they all bright?" she nonchalantly re- 

 plied : "Yes, tol'ably, considering how 

 many the' is of them !" One of her 

 sons, who never married, used to say 

 in explanation : "I like Mam best. 

 Lucky for Pap that he set eyes on Mam 

 before I did; if I'd seen her first, Pap 

 would sure never have got her." A 

 photograph of her sister shows her to 

 have been of large, powerful physique. 

 When her neighbor's child fell into the 

 well, she went down after it, climbing 

 back with its dress held between her 

 teeth, while with her hands and feet she 

 clung to the sides. These two founded 

 strains of widely differing potentiality. 

 In early generations, mental develop- 

 ment was very slow ; many who were 

 dubbed witless in their teens and twen- 

 ties later managed their own affairs. 

 And here, marriage into stocks showing 

 a normal rate of development has ap- 

 parently effected acceleration, so that 

 the mental unfolding comes increasingly 



