=Distinction Between the Mentally Competent and Defective in Criminal Class.=--The parent who has a prodigal son or daughter to-day has the benefit of much social wisdom and much educational treatment of the wayward, unknown in the past. In the first place, we are learning to sort out in the criminal and vicious classes those who are mentally responsible and those who may be supposed to be the helpless victims of their instincts and tendencies.[15] If it is true, as one has said, that "the test of sound moral character is that it possesses coherence under liberty and has learned those various arts of adaptation to ever-varying circumstance which make it a working quality, constant, rational, and automatic," we must perceive the intimate connection between mental power and moral competency. In point of fact, we now know that the overwhelming majority of criminals and constantly vicious persons, in ordinary times when no social hysteria of recent war gives a "crime wave," come from the mentally feeble or perverted types. The draft examinations in the Great War gave a shock to all students of social conditions in their revelation of the widespread deficiencies, physical and mental, of young men of our country. Mr. Henry Wysham Lanier, writing on this topic, shows "that out of a total of fifty-four millions of men twenty-six millions were either in the Army or Navy or registered and ready for call," and that of these "three millions out of thirteen were unfit to serve their country as soldiers." Nearly three-quarters of a million had some mechanical incapacity, defects in bones, joints, etc. About one-half million had imperfections of sense organs and nearly as many serious troubles of the circulatory system. A third of a million showed nervous and mental incapacity for the soldier's work. About 300,000 had tuberculosis or severe venereal disease. About the same number had skin or teeth ailments. Altogether, the first severe examinations weeded out as unfit for the service nearly one-third of those who were drafted. In addition to the revelation of physical and mental defects in the average young manhood of our country, it was found by further examination that five and a half millions of our young men were illiterate. These facts show that in the mass of people from which criminals and vicious people are recruited, large numbers have defects of body, mind, or education, which handicap them in pursuit of an honest living or in the search for helpful pleasures. The step to be taken in order to help the family to deal justly and humanely, but with due response to social duty, with the prodigal sons and daughters, may be briefly outlined as follows: