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IT WAS the custom during the Middle Ages, when human nerves and tastes were more robust than they are now, to entertain one's guests with the antics of dwarfs and cripples. The philosophy behind the court jester evidently was this: If a person is so absurd as to choose to be awkward and misshapen, he deserves to be laughed at. We have now passed that stage of humor, and such things as palsy or a malfunctioning pituitary gland are no longer considered amusing. But the individual with the crippled intelligence is still an object of laughter or wrath among us, and gets both in about equal doses.

The current idea that a person is either normally intelligent or a sheer imbecile is of course as untrue as the notion that one must be either perfectly healthy or sick unto death. There are all stages of broken arches, rheumatism, indigestion, and pain in the back, and there are all stages of skill or lack of skill at reasoning, and all sorts of facilities with numbers and words. Only by the sum total of these aptitudes and defects can we judge the individual. If the total is just a trifle too meagre for the complex demands of modern life, and cannot be made to develop further, then we confront morons, or the border-line feeble-minded, or the dull, or the retarded. All these terms designate different varieties of weak but often likable individuals. They are doomed to carry loads too heavy for them.

In exposing their mental helplessness and the grotesque gropings of their minds, I somehow feel that I am on the humane level of those medieval worthies who may have said "Isn't the staggering of that paralyzed boy a scream? Let's chase him and have a good laugh when he trips." That the mental operations of those of low intelligence are absurd there can be no doubt. But the defense which seems the most appropriate for them, when one more job has been lost because of stupidity, or one more arrest made because of suggestibility, or one more child got into its coffin by gullibility, is the speech of Shylock with but a few words changed: "I am a moron. Hath not a moron eyes? Hath not a moron hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same Winter and Summer as the intelligent are? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die ? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that, -- the villainy you teach us, we will execute, and it shall go hard, but we will better the instruction." No words could better fit the moron, who must lead a citizen's life without a citizen's equipment, and the sombre concluding threat is no less ominous because no moron would have the wit to make it.

From which preamble I descend to the concrete fact of Flora's wedding.

II

Chuck had met Flora on the street and said "How about a show, Blondey?" to which she had replied, "O Boy!" With this introduction matters had gone far before she even knew his last name -- a name which she was now to assume under a wedding bell of Easter lilies. We social workers did not approve of the wedding any more than we had approved of others about which our opinion had been asked. But both high contracting parties were of legal age, however low their mental ages might be (Flora's was between ten and eleven as it happened, and Chuck, who was very dull but not quite so feeble, scored a scant year higher), and they wanted to marry, so there was nothing to do but ring the wedding bells, turn on the "Lohengrin" record, throw rice and old shoes, and wait for the inevitable. Incidentally, let no one underestimate the value of an elaborate wedding for morons, if wedded they must be. The mere signing of a license is essentially too abstract and trivial a formality for those who cannot grasp the idea of law. It takes more than a scrap of paper to hold the family together after a quarrel. But if the veil is long enough, enough jokes are made by the best man, and enough shrieks uttered by the bridesmaids, the impression is made upon the dimly-endowed pair that something really important socially has taken place. They are helped thereby to remember that somehow the clergy and the police will see to it that the bride does not sell the household furniture behind her husband's back, and that he will not leave her with the rent to pay. So Flora, married Chuck on $20 a week, and they went to housekeeping in two furnished rooms.

Flora had been getting $12 and her lunches as a dishwasher in a restaurant, but that could not continue for long. This aspect of the case, however, was not discussed very much, for Chuck seemed genuinely fond of his Flora, and was marrying her under no outside pressure. Ultimately therefore, Flora must budget his $20 a week to cover rent, food, clothes, movies, gas, tobacco, lipstick, chewing-gum -- and layette. To do this required addition, subtraction, and even multiplication, and these processes must be accurate and rapid enough to count the change before the peddler walked way with the extra dollar. Furthermore, a certain ability to use and to understand language was required, because the only callers at Flora's door would be agents for hosiery, vacuum cleaners, vanishing creams and cleaning fluids, veterans selling needles, and children raffling sofa pillows for a fair.

It was a good deal of a strain for Flora, used to the sociability of a cafe kitchen, to reconcile herself to the solitude of her own, and her hospitality never could resist letting persistent agents in for an exposition of their wares. She had consorted pleasantly with Chuck and with her other acquaintances, both girls and boys, without much recourse either to her vocabulary or to her arithmetic. She had always spent her money until she was broke, and then got herself fed by her escort of the period until the next payday. Her conversation was about as follows: If Chuck remarked, "There goes a white horse," she shouted with laughter, and said "Hot dog!" If he said, "That's a Ford," she agreed, murmuring, "You said it," and snuggled closer. She could also say "Ain't it so?", "You're a fright," "I'll say," "Hell's bells," and "You're crazy with the heat." She could, moreover, giggle and say nothing, which worked quite as well. She was healthy and good-natured, she liked company, and was normal in all but mind.

To come back to the agents who were so voluble, and whose living depended upon selling goods, could anyone expect Flora to be a match for them? "Start a home library with 'Flames of Fervor,'" said one. "Greatest deeds done, and who done "cm -- for less than a cent a page." Flora was dazzled -- less than a cent a page for so much print! She made a $5 installment payment, and had nothing left to pay on the grocer's weekly bill, for she had paid a like amount toward a fur coat, the same on the rent, and Chuck had retained $5 for his own use. Four times five makes twenty -- surely not difficult for a normal mind. But a moron cannot grasp its significance rapidly enough to come to a decision before the agent has disappeared around the block.

You recall, no doubt, the standard example in arithmetic which every fourteen-year-old school-child is supposed to be able to solve: If two pencils cost five cents, how many can you get for fifty cents? Not only pencils, but doughnuts, dill-pickles, apples, and cotton handkerchiefs are bought at about this price. But neither Flora nor any of her moron friends could master the problem. We knew they could not because we had asked them. Flora's answer was twenty-five because two into fifty is twenty-five. Her friend Lucille's, on the other hand, was a hundred, because two times fifty is a hundred. (Lucille's husband is in the penitentiary for stealing motor-cars -- he had to steal something to keep ahead of her shopping.) Another friend, Annie, ventured a still more generous estimate. She said: "Five times fifty, because five cents times fifty cents is five rimes fifty, -- whatever that is." Chuck himself answered ten, because "You get two for five, and two rimes five is ten." It will be observed that all of them knew that something must be done in the way of arithmetic, and that their arithmetic was generally correct -- except for the fact that they could not select the right process to employ. A simple problem was to them as Relativity is to the rest of us. If our household accounts depended upon a real understanding of Relativity, we should be precisely in Flora's case, for her capacity to live within her income depends upon simple arithmetical analysis. If she and her friends had been low-grade feeble-minded, they could not have multiplied even their twos and fives. But they were only morons.

It was certainly essential that Flora, out of Chuck's weekly twenty dollars, should save a little for the future, so another example suitable for a fourteen-year-old was set for her. "If you have twenty dollars a week, and spend fourteen a week, how long will it take you to save three hundred dollars?" Flora, who had a sense of humor, could not at first get past the joke that she should ever save anything. "A lifetime," she answered, -- "and a long lifetime." Then, "three hundred times fourteen." "Three hundred times fourteen what?" we persisted, and Flora answered "dollars." The example was written out for her, but she had completely lost the connection, and when she was again reminded, "But how long a time would it take to save it?", she answered, as if through the telephone, "2025." What she meant by that we shall never know. We know only that the firms equipped to solicit business with the mentally unsound will find Flora out and use the courts to collect their bills, and that with such arithmetical equipment her savings account will never be large.

Flora's good nature had often led her into difficulties, not only with agents in the way of rash purchases, but with friends in the way of picking up joy-rides, calling out of the windows to people she did not know, wearing ultra-conspicuous dress when she and Lucille (whom she soon took as a boarder) went shopping, and over-indulgence in matinees which neither could afford, and in which her flirtations with the trombonist made Chuck very jealous. Lucille, as a temporary widow, felt that she had a right to flirt with whom she chose, and Flora, from long habit, followed her example. In what words shall one urge the laws of morals and good taste upon a moron of flaming cheeks and healthy appetites, whose inclinations are those of an adult body with a child's mind? Unfortunately there is no value in exhortations unless one's auditor understands the words in which they are phrased, and what do Flora or Lucille (or Chuck for that matter) understand? All of them stuck in the fifth or sixth grade in school until they were so large that they were ashamed to be seen with the smaller children, and were tired of being scolded for not getting their lessons.

III

It is hard, indeed, to get at just what words convey to them. Flora, questioned, says that lecture means getting hanged, while Lucille says "It's the chair." The fact that her husband is in the penitentiary perhaps explains why both girls should associate the word with "electric." Flora says skill is "you do it," which isn't so bad. Lucille says "you do it to fish." "Not scale, but skill," we repeat. "In your head," she answers, which seems perhaps on the right track, until she adds "a bone." "Not skull, but skill," we insist patiently. "Fry in it," she tries again, and we give it up. For purpose of ordinary conversation, words of that abstraction are too hazy for Lucille.

Of course, uneducated people necessarily have smaller vocabularies than the highly trained. But on the other hand, children taught in American schools and confronted by the newspapers have been exposed to a good many words, and the meanings of a few of them have got to penetrate if any sermon on behavior is to be intelligible. Moreover, it is impossible for good advice to be couched entirely in words devoid of some degree of abstraction. So we ask -- "What is pity?" That seems easy: "You're sorry." Encouraged, we proceed, "What is justice?" "Peace," answers Lucille, "I got married by one." Envy is "enemy," or "You like them," or (hesitating) "You don't like them." Insure, to Flora, means "sure," or "You get it when you're dead," or "They get it at the house," or "It's in the company like," or "It's when you get hurt." So much for Flora grasping the insurance principle when some new agent at the door wheedles her out of a first installment, never to be followed by a second!

Cotton is "wood-like," to Flora, but "comes from animals" to Lucille. ("Like coal," she adds, to make it more clear.) Chuck, however, says with a flourish "That it can be viewed from a perspective point," and Flora is silenced with admiration. Brunette, says Flora, means "blondes"; regard means "guard-like"; civil is "civilized" or "big." "Why big?" "Because the Civil War was big." Another venture was "with knives" -- because the war was fought with knives! In what words, then, shall we express to Flora, "You must learn to keep an account of your money, not spend more than you have, and be faithful to Chuck," when she has already told us that charity is "Don't be silly," faith is "You do it," and when, to a question requiring the answer, "thirty-five cents," she has answered "eighteen hundred weeks"? When it is possible to say that control means "wagon" and chastity means "tricks," what hodge-podge of ideas has one's sermon produced in the good-natured mind of the moron bride, who probably has not been listening in any case, but has only been wondering whether her hair would look better in bangs or with a marcel?

Chuck, who was a barber, specializing in the haircuts of sailors along the lake-front, had a curious facility for words, which always made a profound impression upon Flora and on his other friends, and left one in doubt as to how much of what he was saying he understood himself. It was to be expected, of course, that as soon as the sprightly Lucille was accepted as a boarder, complications would arise. Flora wanted Lucille for the sake other company. But so, unfortunately, did Chuck. He would not have sought her out, and neither, perhaps, would she have angled for him. But both being there, in somewhat crowded quarters (when entertaining guests they always slept three in a bed), jealousies soon arose, and a lawsuit pended.

Lucille had twice before held the proud distinction of being a newspaper headliner. When Joe was sentenced, she had had her picture taken with her arms around him, and a dotted line issuing from her mouth enclosed the legend, "I'll be so lonely without my Buddy." Then there had been a dingy fracas later on, when Lucille charged unknown ruffians with tattooing her shoulder-blade, and that, of course, made a magnificent picture for the evening paper. Lucille's friends regarded the tattooing episode with their tongues in their cheeks -- but no one could deny that her pictures had decorated the pictorial section, and that she had twice been presented to 100,000 readers, first as "Pretty Girl-Wife Waits for Thug," and then as "Flapper Tattooed. Is Chivalry Dead?" It was natural that Flora, equally ambitious for fame, should look about her for some path to glory. The easiest way was to start a lawsuit against Lucille for the alienation of Chuck's affections.

We had long arguments with Chuck at this turn of events, and were of course dazzled by his vocabulary, as no one could fail to be. Since simple language was only a haze to him, we tried the experiment of teaching him virtue through fables, in a manner that has been popular since Aesop, and which is apparently still dear to the public, for no movie programme is complete without its pictured symbolic moral. Chuck was fond of fables and read them fluently. But the question was: What lesson, if any, did he learn from them? We soon found out. From the fable of the man who called to Hercules for help, and was advised by him to put his own shoulder to the wheel, he derived the lesson, "Always do the same to them." He laughed appreciatively at the girl who counted her chickens before they were hatched, and said, "It pays to be broad-minded." He sighed over the crow who was flattered into dropping her meat in order to sing, and said, "That's like Lucille. These flappers. It don't pay to be led by flappery." Of the miller and his son who rook every one's advice about their donkey instead of using their own judgment, he said, "They're so backward, these dumb animals. Too backward, much more backward than human beings!"

Despite these responses from Chuck, the case went on, and so, joy of joys, Flora's picture got into the paper with the caption, "Bride Sobs, I Loved Him So!" This eminence, of course, nettled Lucille, but pleased Chuck as well as Flora, and the resulting letter from him to his wife effected a reconciliation. "I have thought this thing out pretty thoroughly," he wrote, "and I have done this according to the balance method of applied logic. As a result, I am convinced that you are wrong. Not only that, but I have analyzed you psychologically, and checked up on the results. You have heard of psychoanalysis, of course. The results upon synthesis tallied with the facts." This astonishing letter was correctly spelled, written on pink paper and delivered in person! We helped poor Flora to read it, and with the concrete suggestion added by us, that Lucille board elsewhere, the home life of Chuck and Flora was resumed.

I should feel more sure of the reconciliation being permanent if Flora's picture had been as conspicuously placed in the papers as that other friend had been. Alas, it was not, and Lucille has not hesitated to point out the distinction. We'd all be easier in our minds if Flora had sobbed upon the front page instead of the ninth. As for the lawyer in the case, he may now join the grocery and the rest of the bill collectors in trying to squeeze blood from two little turnips.

IV

If the thought processes of our moron friends are analyzed, it is evident that in almost every case one may determine, by vague word associations, why they say what they do. Through a hazy mist of associations they see a vague outline of what is being discussed, and because of the sound of a word, or some more or less intangible link, they clutch at a memory which prompts a response of some appropriateness. Having these vague associations, they escape downright imbecility, but never, except in the simplest of concrete sentences, do they clearly understand what is being said. Their own language is largely Greek to them. They can't make out why it is that other people make so many and such violent distinctions, and why they take such determined stands.

Chuck and Flora will now resume their interrupted domestic life as if nothing had happened, and Lucille will rejoin Joe when he emerges from the penitentiary, or will elope with Micky. Flora on a later occasion will flirt with Tony, and Chuck will make love to Sadie, and they will again make up, or will not make up, as the case may be. But in either case. Flora will merely smile and pat her collar and fidget until we are done scolding, and Chuck will continue to shave the sailors, and nod his head over their "interogenous accounts of reserved times." They will hurl obscene abuse at each other when they are angry (with as little knowledge of its meaning as they have of any other words). Much of this abuse may be justified, but they will hurl it as readily when it is not. Many an exasperated moron mother addresses her own daughter as "son of a bitch." She uses the term, regardless of its sense, merely because it registers disapproval, as we murmur "how interesting" to the statistician's explanation which we have not in the least understood.

In the same manner the moron daughter will agree to some admonition with a cheerful "That's an earful." Because her answer has a vestige of relevance, the enraged employer, the over trustful merchant, or some other victim, will be convinced that all morons are in complete possession of normal reasoning powers, or as, in his heat, he tends to so aptly express it, "They're exactly as bright as I am." Because to the question, "How much does seven feet of cloth cost at fifteen cents a yard?" they can answer, "Arithmetic," or "You got me -- more money than I got," or "Somewhere around a coupla dollars," the inference is that they are capable of providing for their families. Because though twenty-one and voters, their answer to "What is the difference between a President and a King?" is, "Presidents are better," or "Kings are stuck up and want lotsa service," or "Generally kill you, Kings do, at least some don't," it is assumed that the vote they cast has an opinion behind it. I have known many a citizen who voted the straight -- well, anyhow, who voted a straight ticket, whose only answer to the above question was some variation of "They sit different -- on thrones, but a President wears regular clothes."

There must be no sweeping inference from this that all trouble-makers are morons, or that all morons are trouble-makers. Far from it! It is a marvel what can be done with a good disposition and small mental equipment, if the training is good, the surroundings simple, and the social standards high. Not much real thought is required if one is protected and lives with intelligent friends. A well-trained moron boy, who has enough of a way with him to get a smart girl to marry him, is often in clover. His little shop is run well, his wife sees to it that he has tobacco and that his dinners are good. She brings up the children and there is nothing left for him to do but to praise her in the city gates. Also an intelligent man with a moron wife can get along pretty well if she has learned good manners at boarding-school, and he has money enough to pay her debts. Unfortunately, both will get into difficulties with their children. Nature slipped when she made an intelligent mother a necessity for successful children, and yet allowed so many men to be attracted by defective mates. The fact that the dull girl cannot realize how dull she is, and that the ineffective father cannot know how little to blame he is for his failures, makes the ensuing catastrophes no less pathetic. On the contrary, their profuse excuses, their stories so wide of the point, their miscellaneous and irrelevant conversation, their fate always dogging them, but never understood, provide all the essentials of tragedy, for the comic is never absent.

It was my duty at one time to interview a young man. Flora's mental counterpart, on trial for the murder of a policeman. The little fellow had been part of a hold-up party, in which he was either the cat's paw for cleverer members of the group, or had misunderstood directions, or was too drunk to know what he was doing -- or any one of several explanations, none of which could he give himself. He was gentle and good-natured, simple and entirely vague as to the whole affair, for which he was later electrocuted. Even the bailiff, inclined to be severe over the murder of an officer on duty, looked at the mild little murderer with some misgivings.

"It seems hard that policemen must be at the mercy of stupid little fellows like David, and hard that the first notice anyone takes of David is to electrocute him," I remarked.

The bailiff peered at him in doubt. "Can I do anything for ya, Dave?" he inquired gently, but murmured in an aside, "He ain't got a chance. He shot him all right and before witnesses, and that gets the chair."

Then he puffed away down the corridor, shaking his head, while Dave smiled pleasantly, and remarked, "I'm off the booze, all right. Excuse my necktie." The policeman's widow, and Dave's widow, the policeman's orphans and Dave's orphans, the arrest, the trial, the chair -- all were there because David could not exercise the foresight and imagination which he did not possess, respect the law which he could not grasp, and think quickly in a new emergency when he could not think at all. His children will go through the same routine, and we all foresee it -- all but Dave. He meditates upon his necktie, and then is seen no more.

Of course, the real victims of such tragedies are the children. Many are the remedies that have been suggested -- none, perhaps, adequate. Certainly none has been adequately tried. Early discovery of morons is granted as desirable, but what then? Reduction of the number of their offspring is also regarded by most people as desirable. But by what means? Segregation? That means money from the taxpayers. Sterilization? That means fright, opposition, and general panic. No granting of marriage licenses? That means the elimination of something which the moron is only too ready to do without. Birth control? Illegal, or morons cannot understand it, or it is irreligious -- or what you will. Education of the feeble-minded for unskilled labor? Does that solve the problem of the delinquent tendencies of children reared by a moron mother? And so it goes. In the meantime they multiply. Today they compose from five to ten per cent of the population of the United States -- according to how many you include.

As Flora, Lucille and Chuck advance in age from twenty to forty, their escapades become less amusing, and even the most callous reporter does not consider them suitable for his pages. They are doing as well as they can, considering their training, their talents, their temptations, and the heavy burdens laid on their weak shoulders. But they and their pale babies are recognized as disasters. They are still subject to the same diseases and healed by the same means as we. Their children die from epidemics like flies, but pass the germs on to our children before they go. Their children see ours in automobiles, and steal them from us. Our girls must dress in fashion, and so must theirs, even though our boys pay the bills. They all gladly flock toward any frivolity or indecency which we commercialize, and the Greek chorus chants monotonously in the background, "The villainy you teach us, we will execute, and it shall go hard but we will better the instruction." It is a sombre chorus for such poor little actors as Chuck and Flora and their children. In the final tragedy, who are the villains and who the victims -- they or we?