44 CHARLES RICHMOND HENDERSON 



often occur, but it should never be permitted. Real work- 

 ing people have a right to protest with bitterness against this 

 unjust confusion of misfortune and crime. If counties are too 

 penurious to provide separate homes for the aged and help- 

 less poor, the commonwealth should interfere. 



Several states have in their service, at this hour, a small 

 corps of very competent officials in charge of the feeble minded. 

 Out of about one hundred thousand of these hapless children 

 less than one tenth are in expert custody. The others are 

 scattered in homes, in poorhouses, wander about as vagrants, 

 or find their way to prisons and asylums for the insane. Under 

 competent care, this class can be supported in rural colonies 

 almost without expense to the public, educated as far as their 

 limited faculties permit, made comparatively happy in the 

 society of equals, shielded from the humiliations and sufferings 

 of competition, and prevented from propagating their defects. 

 Here is the beginning of actual social selection. The more ad- 

 vanced states have already proved, under expert guidance, 

 that charity the most tender is consistent with the ehmina- 

 tion of the unfit. 



The ability to maintain life in competitive industry is a 

 rough measure of fitness for parental responsibilities. The 

 feeble minded are not competent to care for themselves. It 

 is believed that many vagrants have the hereditary character 

 of these degenerates. Their turn for ehmination will come 

 next, and in the same merciful way, and then confirmed and 

 hopeless dipsomaniacs may be treated rationally. 



The most helpful philanthropy is that which deals with de- 

 pendent and neglected children, and in this endeavor certain 

 principles have been established beyond reasonable skepti- 

 cism. We know that infants without mothers cannot live 

 in large dormitories. When a city continues to keep its 

 foundhngs in a great institution, in face of the statistics of 

 mortality, it is guilty of their death. 



The congregation in huge barracks of orphan and deserted 

 children, past infancy, is now well understood to be injurious 

 to them, so that the system of giving subsidies to church and 

 other private institutions for the support of dependent children 

 is a bounty on bad methods. It corrupts the conscience and 



