rendering it harmless, we should not permit sympathy or sentimentality to blind us to the fact that health and vitality and human growth likewise need cultivation.  “A LAISSER Faire policy,” writes one investigator, “simply allows the social sore to spread.  And a quasi LAISSER Faire policy wherein we allow the defective to commit crime and then interfere and imprison him, wherein we grant the defective the personal liberty to do as he pleases, until he pleases to descend to a plane of living below the animal level, and try to care for a few of his descendants who are so helpless that they can no longer exercise that personal liberty to do as they please,”—­such a policy increases and multiplies the dangers of the over-fertile feeble-minded.(5)

The Mental Survey of the State of Oregon recently published by the United States Health Service, sets an excellent example and should be followed by every state in the Union and every civilized country as well.  It is greatly to the credit of the Western State that it is one of the first officially to recognize the primary importance of this problem and to realize that facts, no matter how fatal to self-satisfaction, must be faced.  This survey, authorized by the state legislature, and carried out by the University of Oregon, in collaboration with Dr. C. L. Carlisle of the Public Health service, aided by a large number of volunteers, shows that only a small percentage of mental defectives and morons are in the care of institutions.  The rest are widely scattered and their condition unknown or neglected.  They are docile and submissive, they do not attract attention to themselves as do the criminal delinquents and the insane.  Nevertheless, it is estimated that they number no less than 75,000 men, women, and children, out of a total population of 783,000, or about ten per cent.  Oregon, it is thought, is no exception to other states.  Yet under our present conditions, these people are actually encouraged to increase and multiply and replenish the earth.

Concerning the importance of the Oregon survey, we may quote Surgeon General H. C. Cumming:  “the prevention and correction of mental defectives is one of the great public health problems of to-day.  It enters into many phases of our work and its influence continually crops up unexpectedly.  For instance, work of the Public Health Service in connection with juvenile courts shows that a marked proportion of juvenile delinquency is traceable to some degree of mental deficiency in the offender.  For years Public Health officials have concerned themselves only with the disorders of physical health; but now they are realizing the significance of mental health also.  The work in Oregon constitutes the first state-wide survey which even begins to disclose the enormous drain on a state, caused by mental defects.  One of the objects of the work was to obtain for the people of Oregon an idea of the problem that confronted them and the heavy annual loss, both economic and industrial, that it entailed.  Another was to enable the legislators to devise a program that would stop much of the loss, restore to health and bring to lives of industrial usefulness, many of those now down and out, and above all, to save hundreds of children from growing up to lives of misery.”