complete protection of all who cannot manage successfully, even in the
simplest details, their own lives and the lives of those with whom
they are most closely related. Yet to-day, it is claimed by many
observers, we have only about fifteen per cent, of those requiring
special protection on this account adequately cared for by society.

The family must be relieved of personal care of its insane, its
lower-grade feeble-minded, and its moral idiots. It must be so
relieved for the sake of the normal members of the family. It must be
so relieved still more for the sake of lessening vice, crime,
degenerative tendencies, and actual waste of public money in public
court procedure and in other public institutional provisions.

To induce the state of mind in parents which will help on the better
and more adequate social care of these afflicted members of society,
the sense of shame and the keen suffering from social stigma in such
cases must be mitigated. It must be seen that although it may be the
fault of one or both parents that such a child has come into the
world, it is an added and deeper fault, even in many cases a social
crime, to leave that child in ordinary relations of life. It is true
that what Dr. Caleb W. Saleeby well calls "racial poisons" are often
the cause of the damaged germ plasm that starts the handicapped human
being along his devious course. Alcohol, syphilis, and other elements
of degenerative action may have doomed the child and in such cases the
father's or mother's sin or carelessness is the cause of the child's
tragical condition. In such cases the dullest conscience must feel
remorse. It is, however, not always the fault of the immediate
parents. It may be a far more remote inheritance that has started the
degenerative psychosis that results in either insanity,
feeble-mindedness, dipsomania, or "general debility of character."

=Heredity.=--Prof. E.G. Conklin says, "Heredity may be defined as the
appearance in offspring of characters whose differential causes are
found in germ cells." Doctor Galton says "the two parents between
them contribute on an average one-half of each inherited faculty, or
each parent one-quarter. The grandparents contribute between them
one-quarter, or each one-sixteenth." The responsibility for a poor
specimen of humanity, therefore, is not solely the parents'; they may
share it with a considerable group. Many a defective obviously owes
his condition to some remote ancesto