The Feebleminded.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 36, 12 February 1914, Page 5

The Feebleminded.

PROBLEM OF THE UNFIT. MEDICAL CONGRESS REPORT. [Per Press Association.] Auckland, February 11. There was presented to the Medical j Congress to-day a report of a •ommittee appointed in 1911 to investigate 1 the prevalence of feeble-mindedness | in Australasia, to educate the people I and to promote a popular campaign I dealing with the same. The report gives tabulated stateI meats regarding the position in each | State, and indicates that a rough total of four per cent, of the children are definitely feeble-minded, and three times that number are mentally dull, and require special training. The census taken reveals a grave prevalence of hereditary mental defects calling for legislative action, and provision for the exceptional fertility of the feeble-minded is referred to at length. To avert the very serious evil of propagation of this undesirable species (.says the report), as well as to prevent the disastrous consequences to the feeble-minded themselves of untramelled and incompetent liberty, some legislation enabling institutions under duo legal safeguards to deal with urgent cases is required. The sexual instinct, in particular, is apt to be utterly uncontrolled in feebleminded persons, and the results need no reiteration. Undoubtedly a very large proportion of our habitual criminals, drunkards, prostitutes and wastrels are really feeble-minded, and if money were spent in preventing by detention instead of making futile endeavors to cure by imprisonment and fine this mass of vice and squalor it would be more happily employed and would go farther. The committee was of opinion that the following is, in general terms, the direction which legislation to provide for the feeble-minded should take: (1) Day schools in large centres to train all children reasonably suspected of mental defect. These will eliminate children wrongly classed as such, and qualify them for further education through the ordinary channels; (2) residential schools for children of the same doubtful class from scattered districts, and for children definitely judged to be mentally defective; (3) in connection with the residential schools to some extent, and probably also, by preference, in separate country localities, residential colonies, with the separation of the sexes, for the permanent care of the feeble-minded' on attaining adult age, when not of so low a grade as to call for confinement in such institutions as idiot asylums.