The Child Who Never Grew

III

I CAME TO MY own country as a stranger. There was disadvantage in this, for I had no friends to guide me, nor any who knew in any way what I needed or how to help me. Yet there was advantage too. I knew what I wanted to find and I had learned from my life among the Chinese to look for essentials — that is, for human quality. I had to determine that I would not judge by money alone. If the right place cost a great deal, I would find some way to pay for it. I was young, I was strong, I was well educated. With those three gifts, I could provide somehow for the child.

I learned a great deal in the next year. It took me in many directions indeed. I had a long list of schools and institutions and I asked for others as I went. Of that intensive search it would be useless to tell every detail, but for those who must make a similar search it may be useful to know certain things.

First of all, I learned not to judge an institution by its grounds and equipment. Some of the finest and most expensively equipped schools were the worst, so far as the children were concerned. I remember one such place. I had spent a whole day with the headmistress. She showed me every detail of the splendidly planned grounds and houses. The children were well fed and well cared for, obviously. She had a resident doctor and a resident psychologist. The attendants for the children were neat and pleasant. There were an excellent school building and a good exhibit of handcraft, done by the children. There was a department of music. Every effort, she assured me, was made to develop the children to the height of their potentiality. She herself was competent, brisk, not unkind. I tried to think of my little girl beside her and could not quite imagine warmth between them, but of course the headmistress would not have much to do with any individual child. So well impressed was I as the day went on that I was beginning to think of the fabulous annual fee and to plan how it could be found. Evening came, and I sat on the wide porch, still with the headmistress, waiting for the bus that was to take me away. Then something happened which undid all the day.

A car stopped and a group of young girls in their teens, all children in the school, mounted the steps and crossed the porch. They greeted the headmistress very properly and she returned their greeting. I saw her watching them sharply.

Suddenly she called to them, “Girls, stop!”

They stopped, half frightened.

The headmistress said in her clear, peremptory way, “How often have I told you to hold up your heads? Go back to the steps and walk across the porch again.”

They obeyed instantly while she watched.

When they had gone into the house she turned to me with a complacent explanatory air. “It is part of my work to teach the girls how to enter a room properly and how to leave it. Feeble-minded people always walk with their heads hanging — it’s characteristic. I have to break them of it.”

“Why?” I asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “These girls all come of good families, people in society,” she explained. “The parents don’t want to be ashamed of taking them about.” She laughed half contemptuously. “Why, I even have to teach them how to hold a hand at bridge and look as though they were playing!”

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“I have to make my living,” she said honestly enough.

We parted on that, but I knew that I would never send my child to her handsome institution. I wanted to find a man or woman who thought of the children first. Of course we must all live, but it is amazing how easy it is to find bread when one does not put it first.

That experience taught me thereafter to look for the right person at the head of the institution. I knew that the employees would be no better than the head, therefore the head must be the best. I ceased to look at equipment and housing. There must of course be space for play, and ample sunshine and fresh air. I rejected the extreme north country because the season outside was so short. My child had been used to a semi-tropical air and much outdoor play. But beyond space and a minimum of cleanliness and care, I began to look for the right people, people who were warm and human.

I might say here that since I was not resident in my own country I belonged to no state and therefore state institutions were not easily open to me. Moreover, they had long waiting lists, and though I visited them, most of them were overcrowded and the children lived in strict routine. Oh, how my heart suffered for those big rooms of children sitting dully on benches, waiting!

“What are they waiting for?” I asked my guide one day.

“They aren’t waiting for anything,” he replied in surprise. “They’re just sitting. That’s all they want to do.”

“How do you know they wouldn’t like to do something more?” I asked.

He evaded the question. “We get them all up a couple of times a day and make them walk around the building.”

But I know the children were really waiting. They were waiting for something pleasant to happen to them. Perhaps they did not know they were waiting, but they were. I know now that there is no mind so dim that it does not feel pain and pleasure. These, too, were human beings — that, I perceived, was the important thing to understand, and many of those who cared for them did not understand it. The children who never grow are human beings and they suffer as human beings, inarticulately but deeply nevertheless. The human creature is always more than an animal.

That is the one thing we must never forget. He is forever more than a beast. Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot speak or communicate with anyone, the human stuff is there, and he belongs to the human family.

I saw this wonderfully exemplified in one state institution. When I first visited the place it was an abode of horror. The children, some young in body, some old, were apparently without any minds whatever. The average mental age was estimated at less than one year. They were herded together like dogs. They wore baglike garments of rough calico or burlap. Their food was given to them on the floor and they snatched it up. No effort was made to teach them toilet habits. The floors were of cement and were hosed two or three times a day. The beds were pallets on the floor, and filthy. There were explanations, of course. I was told that these children could be taught nothing, that they merely existed until they died. Worst of all to me was that there was not one thing of beauty anywhere, nothing for the children to look at, no reason for them to lift their heads or put out their hands.

Some years later I went back again. I had heard there was a new man in charge, a young man who was different. I found that he was different, and because he was, he had made the whole institution different. It was as crowded as ever, but wholly changed. It was like a home. There were gay curtain at the windows and bright linoleum on the floors. In the various rooms the children had been segregated, babies were with babies, and older children with their own kind. There were chairs and benches and the children sat on them. There were flowers in the windows and toys on the floor. The children were decent and even wore pretty clothes, and they were all clean. The old sickening smell was gone. There was a dining room, and there were tables, on which were dishes and spoons and mugs.

“Are the children now of a higher grade?” I asked the young man.

“No,” he said, smiling, “many of them are the same children.”

“But I was told they could not be taught.”

“They can all be taught something,” he replied. “When they can’t manage alone, someone helps them.”

Then he showed me the things they had made, actually little baskets and mats, simple and full of mistakes, but to me wonderful. And the children who had made them were so proud of what they had done. They came up to us, and though they could not speak, they knew what they had done.

“Has their mental age gone up?” I asked.

“A little, on the average,” he replied. “But it isn’t only mental age that counts with them — or with anybody, for that matter.”

“How did you do it?” I asked.

“I treat them as human beings,” he said simply.

When my search ended it was at another place where I found such a person. Without looking at the buildings or the grounds, I knew when I entered the office and shook hands with quiet, gray-haired man who greeted me with a gentle voice that I had found what I wanted. Of course I did not decide upon impulse. I told him about my child and what it was that I looked for, and he listened. There was something in the way he listened. He was sympathetic, but not with effort. He was not eager. He said diffidently that he did not know whether I would be satisfied with his school, but we might look around. So we did look around, and what I saw was that every child’s face lit when he came into the cottages, and that there was a clamor of voices to greet him and call his name — Uncle Ed, they called him. I saw he took time to play with them and that he let them hug his knees and look in his pockets where there were small chocolates — very tiny ones, not enough to spoil a child’s appetite. He knew every child and his seeing eyes were noticing everything everywhere. He greeted the attendants with courtesy and when he made a suggestion — that Jimmy, for instance, should have a lower chair upon which to sit, and so the legs of the chair he liked best could be cut off to suit — the attendant was quick to agree.

The buildings were pleasant and adequate, but not nearly so handsome as some I had seen. The atmosphere was what I felt. It was warm and free and friendly. I saw children playing around the yards behind the cottages, making mud pies and behaving as though they were at home. I saw a certain motto repeated again and again on the walls, on the stationery, hanging above the head’s own desk. It was this: “Happiness first and all else follows.”

The head smiled when he saw my eyes resting on the words. “That’s not just sentimentality,” he said. “It is the fruit of experience. We’ve found that we cannot teach a child anything unless his mind and heart are free of unhappiness. The only child who can learn is the happy child.”

I knew enough about teaching to know that this is a sound principle in any education. It was comforting and reassuring to find it the cornerstone here upon which all else was built. I said to myself that I would look no more.

Upon a September day I bought my little girl to the place I had found. We walked about to accustom her to the new playgrounds and I went with her to the corner where her bed stood. I met the woman who was to be her attendant, as well as the superintendent of girls. The child clung to my hand and I to hers. What went on in her little mind I do not know, but I think some foreboding was there. We had never been separated, and the time was coming when there must be a separation almost as final as death. I would come back to see her often, and she could come sometimes to see me, but the separation was there, nevertheless. We were to be parted. Even though I believed that it was best for her safety that she find her permanent shelter here, the fact that she would need lifelong shelter was the primary cruelty.

In the afternoon of that day which was so dreadful in its passing the head asked me to come to the assembly hall. The children were all to gather there for some music. In his kindness he asked me to sit on the platform with him and to speak to the children for a few minutes about Chinese children. Some of them, he said, would understand.

There are moments which crystallize within an instant the meaning of years. Such a one came to me when I stood on the platform of that room and saw before me hundreds of children’s faces looking up to me. What heartache loomed behind each one, what years of pain, what tears, what frightened disappointment and despair! They were here for life, prisoners of their fate. And among them, one of them, my child must henceforth be.

The kind man at whose side I stood must have discerned something of what I felt, for when he saw I could not speak he told a little story and made the children laugh and I was able to go on again. I think I never tried more earnestly to interest an audience, never had I put myself so wholeheartedly into any effort as I did that half hour of talk with those children. I could not say what was in my heart. I could not tell them I understood their lives better than I understood anything else, because I had lived through such a life. I had to tell small childish things that they could grasp, and my reward was their fresh laughter.

After it was over, the head took me aside alone and talked to me gently and gravely. I have never forgotten his words. “You must remember,” he said, “that these are happy children. They are safe here. They will never know distress or want. They will never know struggle or defeat, nor will sorrow ever touch them. No demands are made upon them which they cannot meet. The joys which they can appreciate they have. Your child will escape all suffering. Will you remember that and let it be a comfort to you? Remember that there is a sorrow worse than one’s own — it is to see a beloved person suffer without being able to help. That sorrow you will never have.”

Many a time since then when I have thought of the child and the waters have seemed to close over my head, I have remembered those kind and wise words. As long as the child is happy, am I not strong enough to bear what is to be borne?

I left her there and, following the request of the school, I did not visit her for a month. The head believed that a full month was needed for the new roots to be put down, and to see the parents delayed the necessary process. They would tell me, he promised, if anything went wrong. So I tore myself away, leaving her for the first time in our lives.

Of that month I need not speak. Any parent like me will know the doubts that beset me. To leave a child who cannot write a letter, who cannot even make known in words what she feels and needs, seemed to me at times the height of cruelty. These times came in the night, and only the thought of a future with the child grown old and me gone could keep me from hurrying to the nearest railway station. Ah, well, there are many who know such hours in the night!

It would be pleasant to say that when I went back to the school at the end of the month I found the child happy and well. This was not true. Her distraught little face, her pitiful joy at seeing me brought back all the doubts again and I was ready to pack her trunk and bring her home.

The elderly matron stood looking at us. “She has been quite naughty,” she said gravely. “She has not wanted to do what the other children do and she has cried a great deal. We have had to deal with her.”

“Deal with her?” I asked.

“Yes. When she ran out of the house we had to restrain her.”

“She is used to freedom,” I murmured. “And of course she was running out to look for me.”

“She cannot run outside alone,” the matron said, “and she must learn to obey. When she learns, she will be happy as the others are.”

Protest was thick in my throat, but I choked it back. “I will take her out for a little walk,” I said.

As soon as we were outside and alone she was as happy as a songbird again, but she clutched my hand as though she would never let it go. I went in search of the head. He was there in his office and he welcomed me and spoke to the child. She seemed to know him and not be afraid of him, and this meant he had been to see her himself.

I began at once. “I think I cannot leave her here,” I told him. “The matron says that they have had to restrain her, whatever that means. But surely they understand that a little child like this cannot suddenly be happy without the home she has always had. She has never been among strangers. She cannot understand why her life is completely and suddenly changed. Do the children have to be forced into a routine? Must they walk in line into the dining room, for example?”

This and much more I said. He let me say it all while his eyes were kind upon us.

“It is not possible for your child to live here exactly as she has in your home,” he said when I had finished. “Here she is one of many. She will be individually cared for and watched and taught, it is true, but she cannot behave as though she were the only child. This will mean some loss of freedom to her. This loss you must weigh against the gain. She is safe here. She has companionship. When she learns to fall in with the others in the small routines that are necessary in any big family, she will even enjoy the sense of being with the crowd. She has to learn, you know. But rest assured that she will be taught only those things which she is able to learn and nothing will be forced on her that is beyond her.

“Try to think of what she will be a year from now, five years from now. Try to consider justly whether this place is the right one for her home. Don’t lose a larger value in some small present dissatisfaction.”

I said, “It is so hard because she doesn’t understand why it is all necessary or that it is for her good.”

“None of us really understands why,” he said in his same gentle voice. “You do not understand why you have had to have the child like this at all. You cannot see that there is any good in it anywhere.”

I could not indeed.

“You cannot shield your child from everything,” he went on. “She is a human creature and she must bear her little share, too, of what is common to all human life.”

Much else he said and I sat listening and the child sat content by my side. When he finished I knew that he had done what he meant to do — he had helped me to find strength to think of the child’s larger good.

I stayed with her for only a day because they said it would be better not to stay too long the first time. Then I went away. I shall never forget as long as I live that I had to pull her little arms away from around my neck and that I dared not look back. I knew the matron was holding her fast and I knew I must not see it, lest my courage fail.

Years have passed since that day. I came to live in America, not far from her, and I visit her often. She is used now to my coming and going, and yet even now there is the brief clinging when I leave. “I want to go home,” she whispers again and again. She comes home sometimes, too, and is filled with joy for a few days. But here is the comfort I take nowadays. After she has been at home a week or so, she begins to miss the other home. She inquires after “the girls,” she asks for some toy or musical instrument or record that she left behind. At last almost willingly she goes back again, after making sure that I am coming soon to see her. The long struggle is over. The adjustment has been made. When the wakeful hours come in the night I comfort myself, thinking that if I should die before I wake, as the old childish prayer has it, her life would go on just the same. Much of the money that I have been able to earn has gone into making this security for her. I have a sense of pride that she will be dependent on no one as long as she lives, and whether or not I live I have done all that could be done.

I realize that many parents cannot be so fortunate as I have been in being able to make a child secure. Some of them have come to me with children like mine and have asked me what to do. They have told me that they have little money or that they have other children and what there is must be divided. The helpless child cannot have everything, however the parents’ hearts are torn. They are right, of course. Speaking coldly, if it is possible to do so, the normal children are more useful to society perhaps than the helpless ones.

And yet I wonder if that is so. My helpless child has taught me so much. She has taught me patience, above all else. I come of a family impatient with stupidity and slowness, and I absorbed the family intolerance of minds less quick than our own. Then there was put into my sole keeping this pitiful mind, struggling against I know not what handicap. Could I despise it for what was no fault of its own? That indeed would have been the most cruel injustice. While I tried to find out its slight abilities I was compelled both by love and justice to learn tender and careful patience. It was not always easy. Normal impatience burst forth time and again, to my shame, and it seemed useless to try to teach. But justice reasoned with me thus: “This mind has the right to its fullest development too. It may be very little, but the right is the same as yours, or any other’s. If you refuse it the right to know, in so far as it can know, you do a wrong.”

So by this most sorrowful way I was compelled to tread, I learned respect and reverence for every human mind. It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly that all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights. None is to be considered less, as a human being, than any other, and each must be given his place and his safety in the world. I might never have learned this in any other way. I might have gone on in the arrogance of my own intolerance for those less able than myself. My child taught me humanity.

My child taught me to know, too, that mind is not all of the human creature. Though she cannot speak to me clearly, there are other ways in which she communicates. She has an extraordinary integrity of character. She seems to sense deception and she will not tolerate it. She is a child of great purity. She will not tolerate habits that are filthy and her sense of dignity is complete. No one may take liberties with her person. Neither will she endure cruelty. If a child in her cottage screams she hurries to see why, and if the child is being struck by another child or if an attendant is too harsh, she cries aloud and goes in search of the housemother. She has been known to push away the offending one. She will not endure injustice. An attendant, laughing, said to me one day, “We have to treat her fairly or she makes more trouble for us.”

What I am trying to say is that there is a whole personality not concerned with the mind, and children mentally deficient often compensate for their lack by other qualities of goodness.

This is a very important fact and it has been so recognized. Psychologists working with mentally retarded children at The Training School in Vineland, New Jersey, have found that while I.Q. may be very low indeed a child actually may function a good deal higher because of his social sense, his feeling of how he ought to behave, his pride, his kindness, his wish to be liked. Acting upon this observation, they developed the Social Maturity Scale, to complement the Binet Scale earlier brought from France and adapted for use in the United States. What is true of the retarded child is also true of the normal one. A high intelligence may be a curse to society, as it has often been, useless it is accompanied by qualities of character which provide social maturity, and the less brilliant child who has these qualities is a better citizen and often achieves more individually than the high intelligence without them.

Today this Vineland Social Maturity Scale is very widely used in the armed forces, in schools and colleges, in aptitude tests, wherever normal individuals are measured. We have to thank the helpless children for teaching us that mere intelligence is not enough.

They have taught us much more. They have taught us how people learn. The minds of retarded children are sane minds, normal except that, being arrested, the processes are slowed. But they learn in the same ways that the normal minds do, repeated many more times. Psychologists, observing the slower processes, have been able to discover, exactly as though in a slow-motion picture, the way the human creature acquires new knowledge and new habits. Our educational techniques for normal children have been vastly improved by what the retarded children have taught us.

In the years which have passed since I led my child into her own world, again and again I have been able to find comfort in the fact that her life, with others, has been of use in enlarging the whole body of our knowledge. When one has learned how to live with inescapable sorrow, one learns, too, how to find comfort by the way.

When I speak of comfort I think now of other parents than myself. I think of those who bring me their children and ask what to do for them. Almost the first question they ask is, “Are private schools and institutions so much better than the state ones that we ought to make all the family sacrifice to the utmost for the sake of one?”

My answer is this: A good private school is usually better than the average state institution. There is less crowding and more individual attention. But even this depends somewhat upon the state. There are states where the institutions are remarkably good, the employees well paid, a pension system established and every inducement offered for good people to say. There are other states where the institutions are medieval. Parents must examine their own state institutions. Where there are ample family funds, a good private institution has advantages. Yet the weakness in most institutions is that often they do not continue beyond the lifetime of the person who establishes them. Some of the finest and most elaborate private institutions will close when the head dies, and the children then must be scattered and must make their adjustments all over again. It is essential in choosing your child’s home that you find an institution which is not dependent upon any one man, but which is controlled by a self-perpetuating board of trustees and has endowments to carry it through the hard years. The state institutions have, of course, an immense advantage in that they are permanent, and once a child enters he is secure for life.

I answer the parents by saying that where a private institution would bring severe sacrifice on every member of the family for the sake of one, I would find a good state institution, even if I had to move my home to another state, and there I would put my child.

When the child is safely in his new home, what are the further responsibilities of the parent? They are many. The child needs the parents as much as before. There should be regular visits, as frequent as possible. Do not think that the children do not know. I have to endure heartbreaking moments every time I go to visit my child, for inevitably some other little child comes and takes my hand and leans against me and asks, “Where is my mamma?”

The housemother whispers over her head, “Poor little thing, her folks never come to see her. Her grandmother came to see her two years ago and that’s the last.”

The little thing’s heart is slowly breaking. For these children are always children. They are loving and affectionate and they crave to be loved exactly as all children do. There are other children who come to tell me, eyes glowing, “My daddy and mommy came last week to see me!” Even the ones who cannot speak will come to show me a new doll that the parents brought.

Ah, they know, because they feel! The mind seems to have very little to do with the capacity to feel.

Another responsibility of the parent is to watch always the person in direct charge of the child. I said that I chose my child’s permanent home by finding as the head the sort of person whom I could trust. Today, were I to choose again, I would also go into every cottage and look at the type of attendant there. Were they the hard-faced professional type, the ones who go from institution to institution, callous, cruel, ready to strike a child who does not conform, I would reject that place. For the most important person in an institution, so far as the child is concerned, and therefore so far as the parent is concerned, is not the executive, and not the man or woman in the offices, not even the doctor and the psychologist and the teacher, but the attendant, the person who has the direct care of the child.

A cruel and selfish attendant who has not at heart the welfare of the child can undo all the work of the teacher and the psychologist. Your child cannot benefit by any teaching unless he is happy in his daily life in his cottage. The attendant must be a person of affectionate and invincibly kind nature, child loving, able to discipline without physical force, in control because the children love him or her. Whether this attendant is well educated is not important. He must understand children, for he has in his care perpetual children.

Any sign of cruelty or injustice or carelessness on the part of attendants should be at once reported by conscientious parents. Do not think that secret bribes or tips will protect your child from a bad attendant. He will take your money and when he is alone with the children, as he is so much of the time, he will treat your child exactly as he does the others.

A third responsibility which the parent has to the child in the institution is to see that the atmosphere in which he lives is one of hopefulness. I have observed that this atmosphere is best in those institutions which carry on research as one of their functions. A place where the care is merely custodial is apt to degenerate into something routine and dead. No child ought to be merely something to be cared for and preserved from harm. His life, however simple, means something. He has something to contribute, even though he is helpless. There are reasons for his condition, causes which may be discovered. If he himself cannot be cured or even changed, others may be born whole because of what he has been able to teach, all unknowingly.

The Training School at Vineland is an excellent example of what I mean. For many years it has maintained an active research department. As I said, it was the first institution in this country to use and adapt the Binet test, and there the Social Maturity Scale was developed. Its work with birth-injured children and cerebral palsy has been notable, and the vigorous men and woman who have spent their lives there learning from the children, in order that they may know better how to prevent and to cure, have infused vitality into the life of the institution, and into the whole subject of mental deficiency beyond.

Parents may find comfort, I say, in knowing that their children are not useless, but that their lives, limited as they are, are of great potential value to the human race. We learn as much from sorrow as from joy, as much from illness as from health, from handicap as from advantage — and indeed perhaps more. Not out of fullness has the human soul always reached its highest, but often out of deprivation. This is not to say that sorrow is better than happiness, illness than health, poverty than richness. Had I been given the choice, I would a thousand times over have chosen to have my child sound and whole, a normal woman today, living a woman’s life. I miss eternally the person she cannot be. I am not resigned and never will be. Resignation is something still and dead, an inactive acceptance that bears no fruit. On the contrary, I rebel against the unknown fate that fell upon her somewhere and stopped her growth. Such things ought not to be, and because it has happened to me and because I know what this sorrow is I devote myself and my child to the work of doing all we can to prevent such suffering for others.

There is one little boy in my child’s school whom I often go to see. He is little because he is only about seven in his mind. His body now is almost forty years old. He has a grave face and there is a forlorn look in his eyes. His father is a famous man, wealthy and well known. But he never comes to see his son. The boy’s mother is dead. When someone approached this father for a gift for a new kind of research he banged his desk with his fist and said, “I will not give one cent! All my money is going to normal people.”

Callous? He is not callous. His heart is bleeding, his pride is broken. His son is an imbecile—his son! In these years he has thought of himself and his loss, and he has missed the joy he might have had in his child — not the joy he sought, of course, but joy for all that.

There is another father — they are not always fathers, either — whose boy loves to work with the cows. I see the lad sometimes, a handsome fellow. He is usually in the dairy barn, caring for the cows, brushing them clean, loving them. I saw his father there one day, that brilliant able man, and he said, “It does seem that if my boy can learn to use the milking machine he could learn to do something better.”

The head happened to be there that day and he said, “But there is nothing better for him, don’t you see? The best thing in the world for each of us is that which we can best do, because it gives us the feeling of being useful. That’s happiness.”

So what I would say to parents is something I have learned through the years and it took me long to learn it, and I am still learning. When your little child is born to you not whole and sound as you had hoped, but warped and defective in body or mind or perhaps both, remember this is still your child. Remember, too, that the child has his right to life, whatever that life may be, and he has the right to happiness, which you must find for him. Be proud of your child, accept him as he is and do not heed the words and stares of those who know no better. This child has a meaning for you and for all children. You will find a joy you cannot now suspect in fulfilling his life for and with him. Lift up your head and go your appointed way.

I speak as one who knows.

Yet none of us lives in the past, if we are still alive ourselves. It is inevitable that, as young parents in their time experience again the old agony and despair when their children are among those who can never grow, they demand some cause for hope. Other ills have been cured and research is being carried on for those we still do not know how to heal. All must be healed, of course. People must not die of cancer or polio or heart disease. Neither should they be mentally deficient if it can be prevented or cured. There cannot be a choice of which will be first. The battle of life must be fought on all fronts at the same time.

Therefore, I say, we must also fight for the right of our children to be born sound and whole. There must not be children who cannot grow. Year by year their number must be decreased until preventable causes of mental deficiency are prevented. The need is more pressing than the public knows. Our state institutions are dangerously overcrowded and unless research is hastened, millions of dollars must go into more institutions. Even if boarding homes are multiplied, care of these children must be paid for, in the vast majority of cases, by public funds. How much wiser and more hopeful it would be to pay for scientific research which would make such care unnecessary! Let us remember that more than half of the mentally deficient in this country are so from noninherited causes, and these causes can be prevented, did we know what they are.¹

Present care, moreover, is very inadequate. State institutions are able to provide very little of the education that might release a good many of the children to normal, if protected, life. It is not possible to do much educating with an overworked staff in an overcrowded institution. In some states the higher positions in these institutions are still political plums, and the lives of the children are at the mercy of a succession of ignorant men. Private institutions, if they are good ones, are too expensive for the average family.

Yet I believe that the private institution has an indispensable place in our American system. Our notable scientific advance has been the result of private persons working in privately owned places. Public funds have developed very little scientific knowledge except for military purposes. So now I believe that research into this most necessary field, the study of the causes and cure of mental deficiency, must, in accordance with American tradition, take place in small private institutions where scientists can work in freedom. Such research should be co-ordinated so there will be no time wasted in duplication.

Something, of course, has already been done. I have spoken of the notable work of the Research Department at The Training School in Vineland, New Jersey. We know that at least 50 per cent of the mentally deficient children now in the United States can be educated to be productive members of society. Education alone would relieve our overcrowded public institutions. Studies have shown that there are nineteen types of jobs that can be done by an adult whose mentality is no more than that of a six-year-old child. Twenty per cent of all work in the United States is done by the unskilled worker.

We know, too, some of the reasons for injury to the brain, both prenatal and postnatal, but we do not know enough. A little physical remedial work is being done for the injured brains which are the chief causes of mental deficiency, but it is still experimental and confined largely to the limited though important field of cerebral palsy, where the decreased blood supply to the brain is the apparent cause for mental deficiency.² Results are still too new to be relied upon, but in one institution they were reported as hopeful: 34 per cent of those operated upon showed definite mental improvement, an additional 51 per cent showed changes for the better in alertness, muscular control, interest span, appetite and increased irritability.

I speak of all this merely as grounds for hope, if and when research really begins in the causes and cure for mental deficiency on a scale comparable to that now being done in other fields. Hope is essential for activity.

Those who have children who can never grow — and few are the families who have not one somewhere — must and will work with renewed effort when they realize that more than half the children now mentally deficient need not have been so. They must and will work still harder when they realize that more than half now mentally deficient can, with proper education and environment, live and work in normal society, instead of being idle in inadequate institutions.

Hope brings comfort. What has been need not forever continue to be so. It is too late for some of our children, but if their plight can make people realize how unnecessary much of the tragedy is, their lives, thwarted as they are, will not have been meaningless.

Again, I speak as one who knows.

¹[At present, the number of cases of mental retardation caused by inherited factors is not known. According to The ARC, over 350 causes have been identified, but in 75 percent of the cases, the cause of a child’s mental retardation is not known. It is undeniable, however, that the leading cause of mental retardation today — maternal abuse of alcohol or drugs — is preventable.]

² [Today it is known that cerebral palsy can be caused by many types of injuries to the brain before birth, during birth, or shortly after birth. Decreased blood supply is only one possible cause of brain injury.]