54 THE KALLIKAK FAMILY 



question of the hereditary character of crime received 

 no solution from the Jukes family, but in the light of 

 present-day knowledge of the sciences of criminology 

 and biology, there is every reason to conclude that 

 criminals are made and not born. The best material 

 out of which to make criminals, and perhaps the ma- 

 terial from which they are most frequently made, is 

 feeble-mindedness. 



The reader must remember that the type of feeble- 

 mindedness of which we are speaking is the one to which 

 Deborah belongs, that is, to the high grade, or moron. 

 All the facts go to show that this type of people makes 

 up a large percentage of our criminals. We may argue 

 a priori that such would be the case. Here we have a 

 group who, when children in school, cannot learn the 

 things that are given them to learn, because through 

 their mental defect, they are incapable of mastering 

 abstractions. They never learn to read sufficiently 

 well to make reading pleasurable or of practical use to 

 them. The same is true of number work. Under our 

 compulsory school system and our present courses of 

 study, we compel these children to go to school, and 

 attempt to teach them the three R's, and even higher 

 subjects. Thus they worry along through a few grades 

 until they are fourteen years old and then leave school, 



