dependent or delinquent, many of whom have
already become parents. We lock the barn-door after the horse is stolen.
We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and
the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the
shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts
to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented
by the feeble-minded persons at large in the community."

How the feeble-minded and their always numerous progeny run the gamut
of police, alms-houses, courts, penal institutions, "charities and
corrections," tramp shelters, lying-in hospitals, and relief afforded by
privately endowed religious and social agencies, is shown in any
number of reports and studies of family histories. We find cases of
feeble-mindedness and mental defect in the reports on infant mortality
referred to in a previous chapter, as well as in other reports published
by the United States government. Here is a typical case showing the
astonishing ability to "increase and multiply," organically bound up
with delinquency and defect of various types:

"The parents of a feeble-minded girl, twenty years of age, who was
committed to the Kansas State Industrial Farm on a vagrancy charge,
lived in a thickly populated Negro district which was reported by
the police to be the headquarters for the criminal element of the
surrounding State.... The mother married at fourteen, and her first
child was born at fifteen. In rapid succession she gave birth to sixteen
live-born children and had one miscarriage. The first child, a girl,
married but separated from her husband.... The fourth, fifth and sixth,
all girls, died in infancy or early childhood. The seventh, a girl,
remarried after the death of her husband, from whom she had been
separated. The eighth, a boy who early in life began to exhibit criminal
tendencies, was in prison for highway robbery and burglary. The ninth, a
girl, normal mentally, was in quarantine at the Kansas State Industrial
Farm at the time this study was made; she had lived with a man as
his common-law wife, and had also been arrested several times for
soliciting. The tenth, a boy, was involved in several delinquencies when
young and was sent to the detention-house but did not remain there
long. The eleventh, a boy... at the age of seventeen was sentenced to the
penitentiary for twenty years on a charge of first-degree robbery; after
serving a portion of h