3. There is another argument which may legitimately be brought forward, and which may appeal to some who are relatively insensitive to the biological or even the humanitarian aspects of the case. This is the financial argument. Except students of eugenics, few persons realize how staggering is the bill annually paid for the care of defectives. The amount which the state of New York expends yearly on the maintenance of its insane wards, is greater than it spends for any other purpose except education; and in a very few years, if its insane population continues to increase at the present rate, it will spend more on them than it does on the education of its normal children. The cost of institutional care for the socially inadequate is far from being all that these people cost the state; but those figures at least are not based on guesswork. The annual cost[78] of maintaining a feeble-minded ward of the state, in various commonwealths, is: Illinois $136.50 Indiana 147.49 Minnesota 148.05 Ohio 155.47 Wisconsin 159.77 Kansas 170.16 Michigan 179.42 Kentucky 184.77 California 208.97 Maine 222.99 At such prices, each state maintains hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feeble-minded, and the number is growing each year. In the near future the expenditures must grow much more rapidly, for public sentiment is beginning to demand that the defectives and delinquents of the community be properly cared for. The financial burden is becoming a heavy one; it will become a crushing one unless steps are taken to make the feeble-minded productive (as described in the next chapter) and an intangible "sinking fund" at the same time created to reduce the burden gradually by preventing the production of those who make it up. The burden can never be wholly obliterated, but it can be largely reduced by a restriction of the reproduction of those who are themselves socially inadequate. [Illustration: TWO JUKE HOMES OF THE PRESENT DAY FIG. 28.--The Jukes have mostly been country-dwellers, a fact which has tended to increase the amount of consanguineous marriage among them. Removal into a new environment usually does not mean any substantial change for them, because they succeed immediately in re-creating the same squalid sort of an environment from which they came. In the house below, one part was occupied by the family and the other part by pigs. Photographs from A. H. Estabrook.] Alike then on biological, humanitarian and financial grounds, the nation would be the better for a diminution in the production of physically, mentally or morally defective children. And the way to secure this diminution is to prevent reproduction by parents whose offspring would almost certainly be undesirable in character.