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I SUPPOSE an apology is due on my part for trying to present a few thoughts on a subject that is so well known to every member of this association. I believe that every member will agree that the segregation and even permanent detention of at least the great majority, if not all of the feeble-minded, is the proper procedure. On the other hand, when you and I discuss this matter with parents or friends having children at an institution, or who are about to bring their loved ones, we find that we do not always display good judgment if we present this matter too forcibly.

Imagine, if you please, a father bringing his boy at the age of eight or ten years to your institution. In the father's mind, he is a very dear little fellow and, aside from the fact that he was a little late in cutting his teeth, talking, and even walking, the father can see little that is wrong with the boy. He expects him to be educated and trained in a general way so that he will become not only self-supporting, but a useful member of society, marry, and perhaps have children of his own. It has been a great struggle on the part of both father and mother to decide to give up their child and place it in the hands of entire strangers. And, if the above referred to results could not be obtained or at least reasonably expected for their child, they would rather keep him at home.

You look the boy over hurriedly as the father must have your opinion before he leaves the institution and, although the father thought his boy was nearly normal, you find that he is small for his age, that he has large, thick lips, with mouth open a great deal, thick tongue, abnormally large ears, and a head that is rather flat and narrow through the temples, but the forehead is very prominent; he talks quite a little when he feels like it, but is often stubborn and will not talk at all. You learn from the father that the boy did not begin to cut his teeth until he was about a year and a half old. He did not walk until he was three years old, and that he was very slow in talking. He has not been to school a day in his life, neither has he been to church or Sunday school. What are you going to tell the father you can do for his boy? It certainly would not be wise at this time to tell him that his boy would have to remain in your institution all his life, and yet, by the experience you have gained from so many similar cases, you know that, in all probability, the child will never develop so that it would be wise and to the best interest of the child, of the family or of so-ciety, ever to discharge him from your institution.

While it may seem strange to some of you that a subject of this nature should be presented at this meeting, I am of the opinion that it can be discussed with profit by this association, for we must remember that many people do not believe as we do in regard to this question and it occurs to me that no one is better qualified from personal experience to present this matter to the people at large than we who are devoting our entire time to the care, training and developing of the feeble-minded.

I suppose most of you have seen a reprint of the paper read by our worthy member, Prof. E. R. Johnstone, at the National Educational Association last year. If you haven't, you surely want to hear what he says on this subject. Prof. Johnstone says among other things: "The place of the school for feeble-minded has long been obscure; of the first one hundred people met upon one of the streets of any of our cities, probably ninety would not know there are such people as the feeble-minded and, possibly, only one of the remaining ten would really know anything of them, and yet, one in every five hundred of the population is feeble-minded, and there is hardly a line of thought into which the feeble-minded person does not enter, either as an object of love in its truest sense, a spur to greater endeavor, a subject of scientific research, a drag upon the progress of a community, or as a positive menace to society."

If what I have just quoted from Prof. Johnstone's paper is true, and I believe every word of it, it is time the public were informed of the condition of affairs and I believe that this should be the mission of this association.

Under this head I would like to include not only the feeble-minded in general but the epileptic as well, for I believe it is quite accurately estimated that of the total number of epileptics, sixty-eight to seventy per cent are either imbeciles or idiots. Only about two per cent are normal and the remaining difference is made up of insane and disagreeable persons in general. In fact, they are the people that should not only be segregated but permanently detained at an institution.

The question of segregation of the mentally incompetent and epileptic has been in the minds of many people not only in our own country but abroad, for many years, and a great deal along this line has been accomplished since the days of Drs. Itard and Seguin in France, who, I believe, were the first to undertake the education of the idiot. In our own country, the principle is firmly rooted in the minds of many of our people that it is not only a privilege but a right that every child should be accorded means for the full development of all his faculties and that this principle applies not only to children born of strictly native parentage but to all feeble-minded alike.