But _why_ this increase of defectives? It can not be attributed to oppression, to grinding poverty, or to decline in attention to our sick and needy, for never was prosperity greater, never were charities more flourishing, never such activity in the search for palliatives and cures. The simple fact is that we are breeding our defectives. The human harvest like the grain harvest is based fundamentally on heritage. And to get a better crop of human beings, we must, as with other crops, weed out bad strains. To whatever source of information we turn the facts are essentially the same. Abroad we find that in England, for example, the ratio of defectives to normals more than doubled between 1764 and 1896. At home, from the investigation of Davenport and Weeks we learn that in the state of New Jersey the number of epileptics doubles every thirty years. And other investigators estimate that the fecundity of mental defectives in general is about twice as great as that of the average of our population. In a recent report of the New York State Board of Charities we read, "There are about thirty thousand feeble-minded persons in the state of New York, of whom four thousand are intermittently sequestered while twenty-six thousand who are a menace to society are at liberty and may produce the unfit." And a passage from the last Massachusetts report reads as follows: "We have been obliged to refuse a very large number of applicants for the admission of feeble-minded women--many of whom have given birth to one or more children. The prolific progeny of these women almost without exception are public charges from the date of their birth." How fertile defective types may be is shown by a passage in one of Doctor Wilmarth's papers which runs as follows: "One feeble-minded woman, now removed from this state, had by different men eighteen children in nineteen years, she alleges." In a letter Doctor Wilmarth tells me that the birth of the twenty-third child of this woman has just been announced! In one English workhouse Potts reports sixteen feeble-minded women who have produced one hundred sixteen mentally defective children, and Branthwaite ninety-two female habitual drunkards who have had eight hundred fifty babies. If we include the two million individuals cared for annually in various institutional homes, hospitals and dispensaries as dependents, the estimated total of insane, feeble-minded, epileptic, deaf and dumb, criminals, juvenile delinquents, paupers and other dependents in the United States in 1910 was approximately three million, or one in every thirty of our population! With the higher fertility of certain of these classes and with only a small percentage under custodial care where will it all end? Is it not time for us to waken from our lethargy and stem this tide of national deterioration?