Leaving out of account the enormous sums spent in private charities even now from one-fifth to one-seventh the total public expenditures of almost any one of our states is going to maintain its defectives, dependents and criminals. From the 1912 report of the secretary of state, in the state of Wisconsin, for instance, I learn that of the total expenses for 1912, sixteen per cent. was for charitable and penal institutions. The situation is even worse in some other states. Think of it! Think what a large total of expense it becomes! And the expense is far secondary from the humanitarian standpoint to the misery involved. In the _Survey_ of May 24, 1913, we find Mr. Hastings H. Hart, Director of the Department of Child Helping of the Russell Sage Foundation, proposing very specifically "a working program for the extinction of the defective delinquent," which involves segregation during the reproductive period. He gives the number of feeble-minded under public care as 20,000 in institutions for the feeble-minded, 16,000 in almshouses, 5,000 in hospitals for the insane, and 26,000 in prisons and reformatories, or a total of 67,000 already under custodial care. And he asserts that as nearly as can be judged, this is one-third of the feeble-minded persons in the United States. Between this estimate that one-third of our feeble-minded are in institutions and Doctor Johnstone's that we are not providing for many more than one-tenth of our feeble-minded and epileptic, there is a wide discrepancy, but I know of no accurate data[20] whereby the matter can be settled definitely. One point of difference may be that Doctor Johnstone specifically includes epileptics and another may be one of definition of feeble-minded. However, supposing that we could get them all into institutions, institutional care at present by no means also implies prevention of propagation. It is not an unusual history of feeble-minded women in our county poor-houses that they alternate between periods of housework in some family and periods of residence in the almshouse, the return to the latter being only too often to bear an additional child.