begun a habit in that direction, the state prison is the proper place for him, because here he can be absolutely controlled and saved from any future acts of this kind. This is precisely what happened in Tronson's case. We are learning in these days that the old adage, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," is something more than a witticism. These are days of prevention--in medicine and in morals. The most important part of our problem is yet to be discussed. It is true we must come to some decision as to what is to be done with these persons who now infest society and who, because of their imbecility which is unrecognized, may become criminals. But vastly more important, because more far-reaching, is the problem of how to prevent imbeciles from becoming criminals. We may save the Gianinis and the Tronsons and the Penningtons from murdering any more people, but how much better if we save them from killing anybody. No one of these persons had, probably, any more instinct to kill than have you or I. As children in years they were harmless and innocent. They could have been cared for and led into paths of harmlessness if not of usefulness. All of them could have been recognized as mental defectives long before they arrived at the age when they committed crime. As dull and backward children at school, they were at once suspicious characters. Attention was called to them. Careful examination, such as is now possible, would have revealed the fact that they were mental defectives and as mental defectives were potential criminals. Then was the time that they should have been carefully guarded and watched and saved from an environment that would lead them to prey upon their fellows. If we wish to save our teachers from the possibility of being murdered by their pupils or our daughters from being killed by their wooers or business men from being struck down by the blows of feeble-minded boys, we must be on the watch for symptoms of feeble-mindedness in our school children. When such symptoms are discovered, we must watch and guard such persons as carefully as we do cases of leprosy or any other malignant disease. For fear that some one should feel that these are rare and exceptional cases, let us remind the reader that the best estimate and the result of the most careful studies indicate that somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 per cent of all criminals are feeble-minded. Whether this holds for murderers is indeed not known. But many persons acquainted with feeble-mindedness recognize from the newspaper descriptions of murders that many of the murderers are feeble-minded. These facts certainly warrant us in taking seriously the problem of the feeble-minded and the criminal imbecile.