Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/493

 CONCERNING A FORM OF DEGENERACY 473

allowed to increase in number until the land is fully occupied. It should include groups of able-bodied, but feeble-minded, laborers, and of lower- and middle-grade idiots, in caring for whom the higher-grade imbeciles can be usefully employed.

On a tract of one thousand acres there would be room for, perhaps, three hundred adult trained imbeciles and twice as many more of the lower grades. For many years, if the land were wisely selected, all the available labor could be usefully employed in clearing, building, fencing, draining, farming, gardening, and stock raising. If ever the crops became more than the colony and the mother house could use, a good market for the finished products — butter, cheese, canned goods, dried fruits, jams, jel- lies and pickles, dressed meat, bacon, hams and lard, and, pos- sibly, clothing, shoes, brushes, etc. — could be found in the state institutions for the insane, the blind, and the deaf without invad- ing the ordinary avenues of commerce.

In such a colony the trained imbeciles, both the higher- and the middle-grade, would be entirely self-supporting, and the burden of the others, with adequate care and protection, would be much less in first cost than that of their present neglect, or semi-neglect ; while the results in economy of every kind in the future would give the state an enormous return on its invest- ment.

No completed colony of the kind exists today, but in Ohio, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, California, and other states beginnings have been made, and some of them have advanced far enough to demonstrate that the plan is entirely practicable. If this plan should be found successful as applied to the feeble-minded, why should it not, with modifications, apply to other classes of degenerates ?

Alexander Johnson.

Ft. Wayne, Ind.