196 LENA K. SADLER 



to support helpless defectives and dangerous degenerates at a cost of far 

 more than five hundred million dollars a year! 



Suppose, my clubwomen friends, a new disease plague should descend upon 

 us which would strike down 2 to 3 per cent of the population, not merely 

 rendering them inefficient but actually throwing all these smitten individuals 

 on the community for their entire support at a cost of over five hundred 

 million dollars a year. What would we think? What would we do? 



We are today face to face with a much more serious problem — one of 

 gigantic proportions — for the menace of feeblemindedness, insanity, and 

 delinquency is a rising tide, constantly growing in volume, because these 

 enemies of society pass on their faulty mental and moral taints to their 

 rapidly increasing progeny. Must we sit supinely by and let all this go on? 

 No! a thousand times, no! 



Here we are coddling, feeding, training, and protecting this viper of de- 

 generacy in our midst, all the while laying the flattering unction to our souls 

 that we are a philanthropic, charitable, and thoroughly Christianized people. 

 We presume to protect the weak and lavish charity with a free hand upon 

 these defectives, all the while seemingly ignorant and unmindful of the fact 

 that ultimately this monster will grow to such hideous proportions that it 

 will strike us down, that the future descendants of the army of the unfit will 

 increase to such numbers that they will overwhelm the posterity of superior 

 humans and eventually wipe out the civilization we bequeath our descend- 

 ants; and all this will certainly come to pass if we do not heed the hand- 

 writing on the wall and do something effectively to stay the march of racial 

 degeneracy, for it is said that even now three-fourths of the next generation 

 are being produced by the inferior one-fourth of this one. 



Public lethargy and general indifference to this subject is due to the fact 

 that we have become more or less accustomed to these conditions. Daven- 

 port says, "We have become so used to crime, disease, and degeneracy that 

 we take them for necessary evils. That they were, in the world's ignorance, is 

 granted. That they must remain so, is denied." The great horde of de- 

 fectives in the world today have the right to live and enjoy as best they may 

 whatever freedom is compatible with the lives and freedom of the normal 

 and thrifty; but society has the undeniable right, yes, and is bound by the 

 duty, to protect itself, by whatever methods it may deem wise, against repe- 

 titions of hereditary blunders. If my profession continues to try to save 

 every weak child that is born into the world; if we continue to serve the 

 unfit baby in our welfare stations, dispensaries and clinics, and if this coddled, 

 protected weakling grows to adolescence and shows that it cannot get out 

 of the fourth grade at school, that it is manifestly defective and degenerate, 



