12 THE KALLIKAK FAMILY 



the hope, indeed insists, that such a girl will come out 

 all right. Our work with Deborah convinces us that 

 such hopes are delusions. 



Here is a child who has been most carefully guarded. 

 She has been persistently trained since she was eight 

 years old, and yet nothing has been accomplished in the 

 direction of higher intelligence or general education. 

 To-day if this young woman were to leave the Institu- 

 tion, she would at once become a prey to the designs of 

 evil men or evil women and would lead a life that would 

 be vicious, immoral, and criminal, though because of her 

 mentality she herself would not be responsible. There 

 is nothing that she might not be led into, because she 

 has no power of control, and all her instincts and ap- 

 petites are in the direction that would lead to vice. 



We may now repeat the ever insistent question, and 

 this time we indeed have good hope of answering it. 

 The question is, "How do we account for this kind of 

 individual ? The answer is in a word "Heredity, " 

 bad stock. We must recognize that the human family 

 shows varying stocks or strains that are as marked and 

 that breed as true as anything in plant or animal life. 



Formerly such a statement would have been a guess, 

 an hypothesis. We submit in the following pages 

 what seems to us conclusive evidence of its truth. 



