808 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
the great impulse that such efforts ‘have given towards 
preventing the reproduction of the unfit, the present genera- 
tion of the unfit is with us already, and unless converted into 
useful citizens—that is, factors for good—they remain with 
us as factors for evil, active and unceasing workers of harm. 
The colony system is a plan of making for these poor 
people a society within society; of furnishing them with 
a social life analogous to the life of that outside world which 
will have none of them; of helping them in the widest 
sense to help themselves. For its beginnings we have to 
look back to the early sixties, to La Force in France, and 
Bielefeld near Hanover. But these have often been des- 
cribed, and so, I think, for our practical needs we would 
do well to familiarise ourselves with the conditions under 
which a number of farm colonies have sprung into existence 
in England and the United States within the last dozen 
years. The most remarkable and the most hopeful charac- 
teristic of the colony plan is its elasticity. An industrial 
colony can make a beginning with three or four patients. 
It can be added to and increased by degrees without 
upsetting the original design, without extravagant expendi- 
ture, or rendering useless existing buildings. The Maghull 
Home, near Liverpool, began in 1889, in a rented house, 
with three acres of land. With some money-help for a 
start, and by taking three classes of patients, at £100, £50, 
and £20 respectively, Maghull has been self-supporting 
almost from the first. At latest accounts it contained 121 
residents, engagéd in gardening, basket-making, carpentry, 
cooking, sewing, and so on. They have a tennis-court, and 
occasionally challenge the village cricketing team. 
The Chalfont Colony, founded by the National Society for 
the Employment of Epileptics, occupies a farm of 135 acres, 
about 20 miles out of London. It has 134 colonists, and 
these are of all occupations—teachers, chemists, bricklayers, 
even a policeman and a lady’s maid. The colony is in- 
tended, like Maghull, for three classes of patients; but up 
to the present only third-class patients have been taken, 
the feeling being that it was they who needed help most 
desperately. It is an open question, however, whether it is 
not, in the long run, wiser to attract rich patients from the 
first, as the justifiable profit made out of one wealthy 
patient would help to support, and therefore to admit, one 
or more poorer ones. 
A rough analysis of the last balance sheet shows that the 
income and expenditure for the year 1900 just about 
balanced, thus— 
