I were to accomplish all
the vicarious reading you require, I should sit up until morning every
night.

However, bring it in. I usually manage half an hour of recreation after
dinner, and though I had wanted to glance at Wells's latest novel, I
will amuse myself instead with your feeble-minded family.

Life of late is unco steep. Obligingly yours,

S. McB.

THE JOHN GRIER HOME,

April 17.

Dear Gordon:

Thank you for the tulips, likewise the lilies of the valley. They are
most becoming to my blue Persian bowls.

Have you ever heard of the Kallikaks? Get the book and read them up.
They are a two-branch family in New Jersey, I think, though their
real name and origin is artfully concealed. But, anyway,--and this is
true,--six generations ago a young gentleman, called for convenience
Martin Kallikak, got drunk one night and temporarily eloped with a
feeble-minded barmaid, thus founding a long line of feeble-minded
Kallikaks,--drunkards, gamblers, prostitutes, horse thieves,--a scourge
to New Jersey and surrounding States.

Martin later straightened up, married a normal woman, and founded a
second line of proper Kallikaks,--judges, doctors, farmers, professors,
politicians,--a credit to their country. And there the two branches
still are, flourishing side by side. You can see what a blessing it
would have been to New Jersey if something drastic had happened to that
feeble-minded barmaid in her infancy.

It seems that feeblemindedness is a very hereditary quality, and
science isn't able to overcome it. No operation has been discovered for
introducing brains into the head of a child who didn't start with them.
And the child grows up with, say, a nine-year brain in a thirty-year
body, and becomes an easy tool for any criminal he meets. Our prisons
are one-third full of feeble-minded convicts. Society ought to segregate
them on feeble-minded farms, where they can earn their livings in
peaceful menial pursuits, and not have children. Then in a generation or
so we might be able to wipe them out.

Did you know all that? It's very necessary information for a politician
to have. Get the book and read it, please; I'd send my copy only that
it's borrowed.

It's also very necessary information for me to have. There are eleven of
these chicks that I suspect a bit, and I am SURE of Loretta Higgins. I
have been trying for a month to introduce one or two basic ideas into
that child's brain, and now I know what the troub