is said in the way of caution against overindulgence of
the wayward, the one thing about parental love that marks it as the
supreme type of affection is the fact that it holds all its own in
permanent bond whatever the character of the child or his return for
devotion.

=Distinction Between the Mentally Competent and Defective in Criminal
Class.=--The parent who has a prodigal son or daughter to-day has the
benefit of much social wisdom and much educational treatment of the
wayward, unknown in the past. In the first place, we are learning to
sort out in the criminal and vicious classes those who are mentally
responsible and those who may be supposed to be the helpless victims
of their instincts and tendencies.[15] If it is true, as one has said,
that "the test of sound moral character is that it possesses coherence
under liberty and has learned those various arts of adaptation to
ever-varying circumstance which make it a working quality, constant,
rational, and automatic," we must perceive the intimate connection
between mental power and moral competency. In point of fact, we now
know that the overwhelming majority of criminals and constantly
vicious persons, in ordinary times when no social hysteria of recent
war gives a "crime wave," come from the mentally feeble or perverted
types.

The draft examinations in the Great War gave a shock to all students
of social conditions in their revelation of the widespread
deficiencies, physical and mental, of young men of our country. Mr.
Henry Wysham Lanier, writing on this topic, shows "that out of a total
of fifty-four millions of men twenty-six millions were either in the
Army or Navy or registered and ready for call," and that of these
"three millions out of thirteen were unfit to serve their country as
soldiers." Nearly three-quarters of a million had some mechanical
incapacity, defects in bones, joints, etc. About one-half million had
imperfections of sense organs and nearly as many serious troubles of
the circulatory system. A third of a million showed nervous and
mental incapacity for the soldier's work. About 300,000 had
tuberculosis or severe venereal disease. About the same number had
skin or teeth ailments. Altogether, the first severe examinations
weeded out as unfit for the service nearly one-third of those who were
drafted.

In addition to the revelation of physical and mental defects in the
average young manhood of our country, it was found by further
examin