same position that prostitution occupies in urban
amentia. The attractive feeble-minded girl--and of course many of these
girls are physically attractive to many men--does not find it difficult
in the country to have sex relations with mentally normal men. Indeed it
is often not realized that the girl is mentally abnormal, and all too
frequently we have a marriage in the country between a woman of unsound
mind and a man who is mentally sound. Illegitimacy is, however, the
larger problem in rural amentia. The same type of girl that in the
country becomes the mother of several children, often by different men,
in the city, unless protected, enters prostitution. The city prostitute,
because of the sterilizing effects of venereal diseases, is less likely
to become the mother of children, but, on the other hand, she scatters
about syphilis, which has so much to do with causing mental
abnormalities. It may be a matter of opinion which of the two social
evils, illegitimacy in the country or prostitution in the city, has the
larger influence upon the spread of mental abnormalities, but there can
be no doubt that the rural difficulty deserves the attention of all
interested in mental hygiene.

It is unfortunate that rural people do not realize more often the
serious meaning of feeble-mindedness. The close contact between
neighbors and the familiarity of community life tend in the country to
develop an indifference to the variations from normal standard that the
high-grade ament expresses. People, as a rule, take the social failures
of the feeble-minded for granted and do not specially regard them as
evidences of mental inferiority. This condition makes the limited
segregation possible in the country very difficult indeed. The
thoughtful parent hardly knows how to keep his child from associating
with the deficient child of his neighbor when they live near together
and attend the same school.

At school also the feeble-minded child is likely to have advantages over
his city brother, which keep him from exhibiting to the full his
inherent mental weakness. A conversation with almost any rural teacher
will impress upon one the fact that the teacher is loath to declare
feeble-minded a child whose records give unmistakable evidence of
amentia and that she generally regards the child as merely dull.
Fortunately this is likely not to be so true in the future, as a result
of the recent instruction that candidates for teaching are now re