What we can do and are now beginning to try earnestly to accomplish is to prevent so many idiots from burdening the currents of life, to wipe out the social disgrace of leaving neglected wanderers on the highways of human effort who are unable to find the path of safety and of success, and to make a protected place of guidance and possible training for all the weak-minded and abnormal.

We can, now we increasingly understand, do more than this; we can help with ever more ingenious and devoted care to give the merely slow and backward a better chance at life's opportunities and help to make these least able to adjust themselves easily to the common ways of the world more amenable to life's discipline and happier in life's restrictions.
=The Call for Preventive Work.=--The new call for social service for the children that never grow up is along new lines of preventive work as truly as in demand for more tender care of all who cannot be helped radically toward self-control and self-direction.

The family, once overwhelmed by tragedies of abnormality, can now be aided as never before in lessening or in bearing the burden of such troubles.

For the less seriously handicapped yet specially in need of social consideration--the blind, the deaf, the crippled, those of cardiac weakness, and the children born tired who might become rested and strong--the family has helps in education, medical treatment and work opportunities suited to the particular need, such as no previous era could furnish.

Agencies for finding employment for the handicapped now show ingenuity of the highest sort in fitting the work to special needs, and the way in which the blind are taught to rise above their misfortune in happy use of the faculties and powers they actually possess is marvelous.