Feeble-mindedness and insanity were also included in the census mentioned, and the total number of the three kinds of defectives was found to be 19 per thousand in one county and 11.4 per thousand in the other. This would suggest a total for the entire United States of something like one million.
In addition to these well-recognized classes of hopelessly defective, there is a class of defectives embracing very diverse characteristics, which demands careful consideration. In it are those who are germinally physical weaklings or deformed, those born with a hereditary diathesis or predisposition toward some serious disease (e.g., Huntington's Chorea), and those with some gross defect of the organs of special sense. The germinally blind and deaf will particularly occur to mind in the latter connection. Cases falling in this category demand careful scrutiny by biological and psychological experts, before any action can be taken in the interest of eugenics; in many cases the affected individual himself will be glad to coöperate with society by remaining celibate or by the practice of birth control, to the end of leaving no offspring to bear what he has borne.
Finally, we come to the great class of delinquents who have hitherto been made the particular object of solicitude, on the part of those who have looked with favor upon sterilization legislation. The chronic inebriate, the confirmed criminal, the prostitute, the pauper, all deserve careful study by the eugenist. In many cases they will be found to be feeble-minded, and proper restriction of the feeble-minded will meet their cases. Thus there is reason to believe that from a third to two-thirds of the prostitutes in American cities are feeble-minded.3 They should be committed to institutions for the feeble-minded and kept there. It is