patience.... On the other hand, for children of high intellectual
capacity, our present system does not go far enough. I believe that
much innate potentiality remains undeveloped, even amongst the working
classes, owing to the absence of opportunity for higher education, to
the disadvantage of the nation. In consequence of these fundamental
differences, the catchword `equality of opportunity' is meaningless
and mere claptrap in the absence of any equality to respond to such
opportunity. What is wanted is not equality of opportunity, but
education adapted to individual potentiality; and if the time and money
now spent in the fruitless attempt to make silk-purses out of sows'
ears, were devoted to the higher education of children of good natural
capacity, it would contribute enormously to national efficiency."

In a much more complex manner than has been recognized even by students
of this problem, the destiny and the progress of civilization and of
human expression has been hindered and held back by this burden of the
imbecile and the moron. While we may admire the patience and the deep
human sympathy with which the great specialists in feeble-mindedness
have expressed the hope of drying up the sources of this evil or of
rendering it harmless, we should not permit sympathy or sentimentality
to blind us to the fact that health and vitality and human growth
likewise need cultivation. "A LAISSER FAIRE policy," writes one
investigator, "simply allows the social sore to spread. And a quasi
LAISSER FAIRE policy wherein we allow the defective to commit crime
and then interfere and imprison him, wherein we grant the defective the
personal liberty to do as he pleases, until he pleases to descend to a
plane of living below the animal level, and try to care for a few of his
descendants who are so helpless that they can no longer exercise that
personal liberty to do as they please,"--such a policy increases and
multiplies the dangers of the over-fertile feeble-minded.(5)