What a curious maladjustment it seems that while all this acknowledged social failure is in progress, and while there is this obvious incompetency of legal methods in ascertaining adequate facts for betterment of the situation, there should be so very little study of where the trouble lies. In courts for adult offenders there is almost no opportunity for unbiassed investigation of the individual criminal. In the juvenile court, with its advantages of intimate relationships established there, how can the judge from his short examination determine even this question of the mental status of the delinquent? Opinion on this subject in courts is formed by the questionnaire method, which from a scientific standpoint, for various reasons, is notoriously unsafe. Not only in court room procedure is there inadequate investigation of the individual, but all through the situation in regard to the handling of delinquents the same is true. Nowadays when the value of efficiency bureaus is everywhere recognized, it seems strange that this most business-like bit of work should not have been taken up. The outlay is millions and hundreds of millions for repression, but practically nothing for the study of how efficiently to repress. In the past the legal disposition of offenders with mental peculiarity has very largely hinged on the question of criminal responsibility. Now this question, especially in the case of high-grade mental defectives, involves some pretty fundamental philosophical points and probably this most dangerous class will never have its responsibility completely standardized and determined. We have in sight no likelihood of finding a test or criterion of the power of ethical discernment and control. The best thinkers have finally relegated the whole problem to the common sense of juries. But a much more profitable way of looking at the matter is whether or not the individual is going to do it again, whether he is going to become a recidivist, a menace to society, and whether he is to breed progeny of the same ilk. The self-protection of society is herein involved. Why should we not drop the technical and hardly decidable question of criminal responsibility and the idea of mere punishment, and take up the much more vital problem of how society is to protect itself?