30 THE TREND OF THE RACE 
superficially bright, many of the moron class pass for people 
of average intelligence; or at least they do not attract general 
attention on account of their inferior intellect. This class con- 
stitutes a considerable proportion of human beings who being 
unable to support themselves are apt to become a public burden. 
It furnishes the criminal class with a considerable proportion. of 
its recruits, and it supplies a large number of prostitutes, a class 
which recent studies have shown to contain a high percentage of 
mentally inferior women. 
The feeble-minded tend to marry their own kind, or to produce 
children without the ceremony of marriage. In cities they tend 
to drift into association with vicious and criminal elements of the 
community and are often led into vice and crime more through 
inherent weakness of intellect and will than natural depravity of 
their own. In the country they frequently segregate into com- 
munities, where there is often intermarriage of related stocks 
which brings forth the latent defects of both sides. Such rural 
communities are characterized by poverty, alcoholism, sexual 
immorality and crime. The histories of several notorious feeble- 
minded families have been followed in recent years and they have 
yielded results of much interest and importance to students of 
social problems. One of the most noteworthy of these instances 
forms the subject-matter of Goddard’s fascinating book, The 
Kallikak Family. The starting point of the investigation de- 
scribed in this book was made in the effort to trace the ancestry of 
a feeble-minded girl, Deborah, who had become an inmate of a 
home for the feeble-minded at Vineland, N. J. Deborah had been 
born in the almshouse. Her mother was feeble-minded and had 
had several other children by various men. The field worker, 
Miss E. S. Kite, who worked out the genealogy of the Kallikak 
family, succeeded in tracing its ancestry to a Martin Kallikak, a 
soldier in the revolutionary war. While at an inn Martin Kalli- 
kak made the acquaintance of a feeble-minded girl by whom he 
had a son named Martin Kallikak, Jr. Later Martin Kallikak 
married a normal woman of good family and raised several chil- 
dren. ‘All of the legitimate children of Martin, Sr., married into 
