ion, this cheapening of child life, is to speak crudely but
frankly the direct result of overproduction. "Restriction of output" is
an immediate necessity if we wish to regain control of the real values,
so that unimpeded, unhindered, and without danger of inner corruption,
humanity may protect its own health and powers.

(1) I am indebted to the National Child Labor Committee for
these statistics, as well as for many of the facts that
follow.

(2) "People Who Go to Beets" Pamphlet No. 299, National
Child Labor Committee.

(3) California the Golden, by Emma Duke. Reprinted from
The American Child, Vol. II, No. 3. November 1920.

(4) Cf. Child Welfare in Oklahoma; Child Welfare in
Alabama; Child Welfare in North Carolina; Child Welfare in
Kentucky; Child Welfare in Tennessee. Also, Children in
Agriculture, by Ruth McIntire, and other studies.

(5) W. R. Inge: Outspoken Essays: p. 92

(6) Cf. Tredgold: Inheritance and Educability. Eugenics
Review, Vol. Xiii, No. I, pp. 839 et seq.

(7) Cf. New York Times, June 4, 1921.

(8) "Studies in the Psychology of Sex," Vol. VI. p. 20.

CHAPTER IV: The Fertility of the Feeble-Minded

What vesture have you woven for my year?
O Man and Woman who have fashioned it
Together, is it fine and clean and strong,
Made in such reverence of holy joy,
Of such unsullied substance, that your hearts
Leap with glad awe to see it clothing me,
The glory of whose nakedness you know?

"The Song of the Unborn"
Amelia Josephine Burr

There is but one practical and feasible program in handling the great
problem of the feeble-minded. That is, as the best authorities are
agreed, to prevent the birth of those who would transmit imbecility to
their descendants. Feeble-mindedness as investigations and statistics
from every country indicate, is invariably associated with an abnormally
high rate of fertility. Modern conditions of civilization, as we are
continually being reminded, furnish the most favorable breeding-ground
for the mental defective, the moron, the imbecile. "We protect the
members of a weak strain," says Davenport, "up to the period of
reproduction, and then let them free upon the community, and encourage
them to leave a large progeny of `feeble-minded': which in turn,
protected from mortality and carefully nurtured up to the reproductive