lies to those serving
life sentences--an unnecessary application. Although falling short of an
ideal measure in some other particulars, it seems on the whole to be
satisfactorily administered.

Connecticut's law provides that all inmates of state prisons and of the
state hospitals at Middletown and Norwich may be sterilized if such
action is recommended by a board of three surgeons, on eugenic or
therapeutic grounds. It has been applied to a few insane persons (21, up
to September, 1916).

Nevada has a purely punitive sterilization law applying to habitual
criminals and sex offenders. The courts, which are authorized to apply
it, have never done so.

[Illustration: FEEBLE-MINDED MEN ARE CAPABLE OF MUCH ROUGH LABOR

FIG. 30.--Most of the cost of segregating the mentally
defective can be met by properly organizing their labor, so as to make
them as nearly self-supporting as possible. It has been found that they
perform excellently such work as clearing forest land, or reforesting
cleared land, and great gangs of them might profitably be put at such
work, in most states. Photograph from the Training School, Vineland, N.
J.]

[Illustration: FEEBLE-MINDED AT A VINELAND COLONY

FIG. 31.--They have the bodies of adults but the minds of
children. It is not to the interest of the state that they should be
allowed to mingle with the normal population; and it is quite as little
to their own interest, for they are not capable of competing
successfully with people who are normal mentally.]

Iowa's comprehensive statute applies to inmates of public institutions
for criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble-minded, imbeciles, lunatics,
drug fiends, epileptics, syphilitics, moral and sexual perverts and
diseased and degenerate persons. It is compulsory in case of persons
twice convicted of felony or of a sexual offense other than "white
slavery," in which offense one conviction makes sterilization mandatory.
The state parole board, with the managing officer and physician of each
institution, constitute the executive authorities. The act has many
objectionable features, one of the most striking of which is the
inclusion of syphilitics under the head of persons whom it is proposed
to sterilize. As syphilis is a curable disease, there is scarcely more
reason for sterilizing those afflicted with it than there is for
sterilizing persons with measles. It is true that the sterilization of a
large number of syphilitics might have a eugenic e