Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/550

532 frequently developing an aptitude for music, drawing, and the various industries. These are the backward children that the schools complain of—the "feebly-gifted" ones of England, the "tardivi" of Italy, "les enfants arrièrés" of France.

These are they so often not recognized in seminary or college life until under excessive pressure or the excitement of competition comes complete breakdown—idiocy, insanity, or early death.

So nearly normal are many of these that their defect would perhaps be noticed only by the initiated, and the question is often asked, "Why are these who do so well accounted feeble-minded?" the public little knowing that the time and labor have been double those expended for like results with a normal child.

The moral imbecile, generally of high or middle grade, quick of apprehension, crafty, and cunning; or, if of low grade, sullen and cruel often to brutishness, absolutely destitute of the moral sense—what might be termed ammoral or unmoral—is too dangerous an element to be permitted in the schools. This, the saddest victim of a fatal inheritance, is he who claims most at the hands of society and who gets least, because, precocious and often abnormally bright, he is, as a certain jurist once delighted in saying, "the kind we hang." As intellectual training does but add to his armament of ill, for him should be provided, within strongly guarded asylum walls, all the benefits of a manual training school and its outcome in the various trades, which shall at once give vent for his superflous energy and render him self-supporting; but this should be coupled with all the ameliorations of cheerful living that humanitarianism owes to this scapegoat for the sins of others.

Hard labor and lifelong sequestration are the only medicine for his ill—a disease too often due to the sins of a normal ancestry.

The idio-imbecile, who, as the name implies, partakes of the nature of both the idiot and the imbecile, is generally undersized, with very defective speech, and a limited vocabulary confined to a few scattered words, never a full sentence. His improvement is but limited. The most we can hope to do is to keep his nervous, restless fingers employed. He can sometimes learn to knit, to weave mats, or do simple housework, but never to read or write. For him, as for the idiot, but little can be done beyond giving the custodial care best adapted to his peculiar needs, the genuine benefit being found in the family relieved of such a burden, as it has been computed that for every case sequestrated, two if not four normal persons are released to society.

The idiot is usually but poorly developed, in most cases unable to stand or even to sit alone. Hardly conscious of his physical needs, he has no language but a cry, He rarely learns to talk; indeed, in