86 Proceedings of Indiana Academy of Science. 
strong and no one would rent him a good farm. This farm is under 
water two months in the flood season, and in the winter they cannot 
get out because of snow. Yet they never try to better themselves—they 
accept their condition with calm indifference. 
The broad highway of town and open country has its fascination for 
the feeble-minded just as it has for the rest of us. I cannot walk on 
the street at any time and fail to see defectives. But when, as in 
Indiana, it has been my “job” to hunt for them, I need only to select 
my section of the town and then go into house after house and talk 
with them. I like to talk with a Moron mother or father—they will 
tell so guilelessly just what I want to know: “Katy’s baby ain’t got no 
father. No, no, Katy never was real bright—she didn’t learn nothing 
in school. John? He’s fourteen and in the fourth grade—he’s smarter 
than the others. John can write his name real nice. The old man, you 
say? Nope. He can’t read. My first man could, though, but not the 
second one. This man can’t keep no steady job; he’s working on the 
coal bank now. Henry? Oh, Henry’s in school in Indianapolis.” I ask, 
“Is he in Plainfield?” “Yes, that’s the place. Seems like he’ll never 
get out. My least boy, he’s ain’t stout and he has red, sore eyes; the 
teacher can’t learn him nothing ’cause he can’t see. My other big girl, 
she’s got red, sore eyes, too——” and so on. 
Behind it and through it all I can read the old, old story of prosti- 
tution, illegitimacy, delinquency and general no-accountness of the feeble 
minds behind it. You may think I made up this story, but it is the story 
I heard from a gaudily dressed low-grade Moron mother, who did not 
know that I knew that she herself was a prostitute. 
In the towns and cities the presence of the feeble-minded complicates 
our social service; it increases the number of accidents and adds to the 
list of the unemployed. The school system is corroded with the lower 
3 per cent of its population mentally unfit to profit by its teaching. 
The administration of poor relief by the overseers of the poor lends 
almost -all of its time and money to the feeble-minded of the township. 
I just had one township trustee tell me, with something like disgust, 
that two of his many paupers had married the only two paupers 
(widows) in a nearby township—thereby clearing one record and adding 
two families of feeble-minded children to his list. Later in the same 
day the trustee who had lost his two pauper women and their families 
told:me the same story—but he thought it was funny! Poor farms are 
filled with feeble-minded folk who never did get along, and many of 
them entered the farm between twenty and forty years of age and have 
spent many years there. I talked with one woman in a county farm 
who had married four times, her last two husbands being inmates of 
the same poor farm. She had one epileptic daughter. That girl is now 
