If we build suitable institutions for the mentally defective, with enough room in them for all who cannot safely be left at large—not necessarily ex pensive institutions, but safe, clean, equipped with all appropriate means for providing employment, education, recreation, and considerate care; and if we provide adequately for the maintenance of these institutions, we shall be doing our first large duty. Commitment to such institutions should be compulsory, if necessary, though there is ad vantage in having also institutions to which access is voluntary, and the guardianship should last as long as the condition lasts, that is, ordinarily, for life. The establishment and adequate maintenance and actual use of such colonies for the feeble minded would actually eliminate enough prostitu tion, intemperance, pauperism, crime, and disease to pay for their cost probably many times over. But the financial argument is subordinate to the argument from social construction: it would cut out just so many weak spots in our social founda tions; it would put an end to an appalling amount of actual misery, actual loss of life and property, actual failure, suffering, and disgrace.
Closely connected with this subject is the prob lem of illegitimacy. It is desirable that children shall be born in wedlock. The illegitimate child has less chance than others to be born alive; it has only about half the chances of living through its first year; and in other ways, too well known to need mention, it is handicapped from the outset. The point at which to prevent illegitimate births is in the home and at school, long before they would occur, by the development of the will of the strong and by the protection of the person of the weak. Guarding the mentally defective in the way we have just been considering would do more than any other single measure, cutting out at once a very consider able proportion. Something in the way of deter
rence can be accomplished by prosecution when the girl is under the age of consent, and by fastening responsibility for the child on its father, whether married or not; but these proceedings are effective only in so far as they have the sympathy of public opinion as represented by juries and courts. The repeal of all so-called bastardy laws and the sub stitution of a simple and humane process by which an unmarried mother may, without any such stigma on her unborn child, secure from its father the means of its support and of care in her own con finement, would be a very desirable reform. Some thing can be done, also, to influence the girl at this time and prevent a recurrence of her misfortune, and by far the greatest hope lies in conscious efforts to shield young girls and young men from extra ordinary temptations.
So much the law and organized social work can do, but mainly the purification of parenthood, the social insurance of a wholesome birth, depends upon the individual. There is no adequate safe guard against unfit births except an early acquired ideal of preparation for parenthood: an ideal a mounting to a passion, strong enough to keep the baser passions in subjection, to hold the strong young men to a purity of life, to a rational use and a normal development of all their youthful powers; an ideal of motherhood not too remote or too at tenuated to exercise a positive influence on the youthful maidens among all the new tendencies and temptations, the strong currents of opinion and emancipating waves of emotion to which they are subjected. Domestic ideals have rivals in our time. They must be exalted the more. We must edu cate toward them, whatever other ideals we are also ready to recognize.