all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the
thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific.
Feeble-mindedness in one generation becomes pauperism or insanity in the
next. There is every indication that feeble-mindedness in its protean
forms is on the increase, that it has leaped the barriers, and that
there is truly, as some of the scientific eugenists have pointed out, a
feeble-minded peril to future generations--unless the feeble-minded are
prevented from reproducing their kind. To meet this emergency is the
immediate and peremptory duty of every State and of all communities.

The curious situation has come about that while our statesmen are
busy upon their propaganda of "repopulation," and are encouraging the
production of large families, they are ignoring the exigent problem of
the elimination of the feeble-minded. In this, however, the politicians
are at one with the traditions of a civilization which, with its
charities and philanthropies, has propped up the defective and
degenerate and relieved them of the burdens borne by the healthy
sections of the community, thus enabling them more easily and more
numerously to propagate their kind. "With the very highest motives,"
declares Dr. Walter E. Fernald, "modern philanthropic efforts often tend
to foster and increase the growth of defect in the community.... The only
feeble-minded persons who now receive any official consideration are
those who have already become 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."