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The second point on which I seem to have been misunderstood relates to placing out. I am sure I don't want to be quoted as placing out feeble-minded boys and girls because I never intended to advocate any such principle. The cases which we have out on parole are morons who have been, say, trained and educated so that they seem very much like normal people. It is a question as to whether we should allow their parents to take them out for we want to keep a legal hold on them and give them a bit of supervision. We either have the choice of doing that or allowing them to be discharged and losing control. By the parole, we have a string on them. I believe that these persons would be better off in the institution but if we kept those forty patients, I think we would be violating the public sentiment of at least forty communities, and I think the presence of the feeble-minded people in the community in this way serves an educational purpose. I think there is a possibility that we may carry this segregation work so far and do our work so well that in a generation or two people would forget our teaching. So I think that the cases that can be returned to the community under proper parole restrictions are in a way, wholesome object lessons. They serve to prevent the community from forgetting. These boys who have gone out, with two exceptions, are city boys, because we deal almost entirely with the urban or town population, collected from manufacturing towns. I agree with the speaker who referred to the immorality of the country town. I think that the feeble-minded boy who is brought up in the city with city traditions in his blood is very unhappy on a farm. I think that the theory that the farm is necessarily good for people who are defective or criminal is open to a good deal of criticism. Placing-out agents from the reform schools for boys tell us that many boys who are happy, contented and do well in cities, being city bred and having the traditions of city life, will be perfectly lazy out with the trees.

There is a faction in Massachusetts who believe that the institution for feeble-minded ought to care for the defective delinquent. The first application of the new law will be a re-classification of the people now in the penal institutions. This merely means a separation of the mentally defective prisoners from the normal ones. It seems to be a good tentative method which promises growth and can be modified as found necessary. The defective delinquents are an incorrigible, troublesome class. They are not amenable to the altruistic principles which we see around us here. The ordinary defective delinquent in Vineland would co-operate with some of your customs and traditions, but if you had many, especially those who had criminal experiences, I don't think you could handle them. There is a very large class of these defectives. Any state with a population large enough to maintain an institution for the feeble-minded, would have a very large class of the type of feeble-minded who properly classify as defective delinquents. Some of them are very desperate and determined people. The mere prevention of escape is to them often a serious matter. The medico-legal significance of feeblemindedness we have only begun to study. We have institutions for insane criminals, and yet there are probably five imbecile criminals to one insane criminal. The imbecile is by his very nature susceptible to criminal influence. Probably no paper on the feeble-minded is read without that fact being stated and yet up to this time we have made absolutely no provision for the differentiation of this class from other criminals.