RURAL HEALTH MENTAL 209 



or in the kitchen, the farm laborer and kitchen girl find their 

 recreation in an evening of gossip, for they know every one in 

 the neighborhood. They may live near enough to their homes 

 to go there at night. If such is the case, one dirty kitchen may 

 hold half a dozen men and the women of the house. They 

 smoke and drink cider and pass rude jests together and in the 

 end sometimes fight. Away from home, they are ostracized by 

 the other social classes. They occasionally have a dance which 

 will bring together many of the same class from neighboring 

 towns. 



Under these circumstances it is not surprising that early 

 marriages are the rule. After the legal age is passed, school 

 work is dropped and, for a girl, the servant's life often begins, 

 unless she is married at once. At any rate she anticipates mar- 

 riage and works with that as a goal, not to escape work, but to 

 gain a certain independence and that end of all effort, "to be 

 married." Nor is it surprising that cousin marriages are fre- 

 quent. In fact, even where no known relationship exists be- 

 tween the contracting parties, it is probable that they are from 

 the same strains. The early marriage is usually followed by a 

 large family of children. Some die in infancy in nearly every 

 home, but most of them survive a trying babyhood and develop 

 fairly robust pl^sical constitutions. They are born into the 

 same narrow circle that their parents were, and unless some 

 powerful factor changes the routine, they are apt to follow the 

 same path until past middle age. For, except where tuberculosis 

 has ravaged, disease has spared these people. So it is that the 

 meager social life, the customs of their parents, the natural ostra- 

 cism of the higher classes, and the individual's preference for a 

 congenial mate induce endogamy, or in-marriage, among the 

 mentally deficient. 



It has been maintained that the dispersion of such communi- 

 ties of feeble-minded persons would stimulate out-marriage and 

 that this would increase the chance of marriage with different 

 and perhaps better blood and thus diminish the frequency of ap- 

 pearance of defects in the next generation. The instances of two 

 daughters who married comparatively normal men supports 

 this view. Their progeny are, as a whole, a better class of citi- 

 zens than the progeny of their sisters who mated with feeble- 



