CHAPTER X.
THE CHILDREN THAT NEVER GROW UP "It was perhaps an idle thought But I imagined that if day by day I watched him and seldom went away, And studied all the beatings of his heart With zeal (as men study some stubborn art For their own good) and could by patience find An entrance to the caverns of his mind-- I might reclaim him from his dark estate." -- SHELLEY.
"One man, at least, I know, Who might wear the crest of Bayard Or Sidney's plume of snow.
Behold him, The Cadmus of the blind, Giving the dumb lips language, The idiot clay a mind.
Wherever outraged Nature Asks word or action brave, Wherever struggles labor, Wherever groans a slave,-- Wherever rise the peoples, Wherever sinks a throne, The throbbing heart of Freedom finds An answer in his own.
Knight of a better era, Without reproach or fear! Said I not well that Bayards And Sidneys still are here ?" -- WHITTIER'S tribute to Dr.Howe.
=The Defective Children.=--Not those who die young, full of promise, to leave a memory of exquisite budding loveliness cut short by untimely frosts, but those who live on from infancy to childhood and from youth to physical maturity and even on to old age, yet never become responsible adults--these are the children we must consider.
The demand of the eugenists that such, if obviously defective, should be prevented from bringing forth after their kind is clearly the only social wisdom.

The statistics of social pathology all point to mental defectiveness as the prolific cause of crime, immorality, vocational incompetency, illegitimacy, family failure, and marital tragedy.

In a recent study of one hundred families in which feeble-mindedness was obvious, a study carried on by the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, immorality was found in 58 per cent.

of them; extreme filth and bad home conditions were found in 30 per cent.; and in 47 per cent.

one or more members of these families were public charges.