RURAL HEALTH MENTAL 205 



3. Feeble-mindedness' is hereditary. There has never been 

 found a normal child both of whose parents are feeble-minded. 



4. From 25 to 50 per cent, of our law-breakers are feeble- 

 minded. They are dominated by an inherited tendency to crime. 

 The percentage of commitments for major crimes, such as mur- 

 der, arson and rape, is apparently twice as great among mental 

 defectives as among normal people. 



5. From feeble-mindedness springs, by inheritance, insanity, 

 epilepsy and all forms of neurotic degeneracy. 



6. A very large percentage of prostitutes are feeble-minded. 

 In 1911 the Department of Research of the New Jersey Training 

 School for Feeble-minded tested fifty-six delinquent girls, "all 

 of whom had probably committed the worse offense a young girl 

 can." Fifty-two were found to be mental defectives. A test 

 recently made of one hundred girls taken at random from the 

 New York Reformatory for Women at Bedford, by the Bureau 

 of Social Hygiene, established by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., 

 showed that all were apparently feeble-minded. Their average 

 physical age was twenty years, nine and seven-tenths months; 

 their average mental age, ten and five-tenths years. As shown 

 elsewhere in this report, a test of inmates of our reformatory 

 for delinquent white girls revealed the fact that thirty out of 

 thirty-five were mental defectives. Out of 300 women examined 

 by the Massachusetts Vice Commission only six were found to 

 have ordinary intelligence. 



In view of these facts it is apparent that our great problems 

 of crime, insanity and the social evil are inseparably intertwined 

 with the problem of feeble-mindedness. Whatever progress we 

 may make in the treatment of criminals there can be no great 

 reduction of crime so long as we ignore the fact of criminal 

 inheritance, and whatever we may do toward the segregation 

 of the insane, or toward the suppression of the social evil, we 

 shall contribute little toward the actual solution of these prob- 

 lems so long as we make no attempt to stem the appalling tide 

 of feeble-minded offspring that is increasingly pouring forth 

 from our large and ever-growing class of mental defectives. So 

 far as modern investigation enables us to see, the most pressing 

 social need of our time is the segregation of the feeble-minded. 



