The farm and the village have a considerable amount of routine work
which can be done by these sub-normal people and they therefore have
opportunity to maintain themselves and to multiply to better advantage
than in the city where the competition of life is keener. Although they
are best off in a rural environment, when unrestricted and unsegregated
they are a constant menace to the community and often involve it in
considerable expense. As soon as farmers become aware of what the
feeble-minded are costing the community, how they endanger its moral and
physical health, and that when unrestricted they continue to reproduce
incapables and thus perpetuate the burden, they will demand that some
practicable and reasonable measures be taken for their control. The
difficulty is that at present in most states there is no method whereby
the feeble-minded can be committed to state institutions or be otherwise
segregated unless they are paupers or unless they go voluntarily, nor is
there any means of preventing their marriage and reproduction. Dairy
farmers have learned that it pays to weed out the "boarder" cows from
their herds and that if they breed from a scrub sire they will have
scrub stock; but if the boarder cow was also inclined to become vicious
and to corrupt the habits of the rest of the herd and the farmer knew
this trait to be hereditary, he would invariably send such a cow to the
butcher. I believe that as soon as farmers appreciate the biological
significance of feeble-mindedness they will insist upon reasonable
legislation for its control.
_Delinquency._--The third class of abnormal citizens are the
delinquents, both adult and juvenile. Almost every rural community has a
certain number of adults and children who, although not definitely
criminal, are constantly committing various misdemeanors, are vicious,
or incorrigible, and there are occasional rural communities and
neighborhoods which are as true slums as are found in the cities.[72]
Drunkenness was formerly the greatest cause of delinquency, and the
tavern and saloon were responsible for the prohibition movement whose
staunchest supporters were rural people. The bootlegger and the illicit
still continue the illegal traffic in liquor, but where prohibition has
been in force for some time liquor has ceased to be an important factor
in delinquency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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