| Illinois | $136.50 |
| Indiana | 147.49 |
| Minnesota | 148.05 |
| Ohio | 155.47 |
| Wisconsin | 159.77 |
| Kansas | 170.16 |
| Michigan | 179.42 |
| Kentucky | 184.77 |
| California | 208.97 |
| Maine | 222.99 |
At such prices, each state maintains hundreds, sometimes thousands, of feeble-minded, and the number is growing each year. In the near future the expenditures must grow much more rapidly, for public sentiment is beginning to demand that the defectives and delinquents of the community be properly cared for. The financial burden is becoming a heavy one; it will become a crushing one unless steps are taken to make the feeble-minded productive (as described in the next chapter) and an intangible "sinking fund" at the same time created to reduce the burden gradually by preventing the production of those who make it up. The burden can never be wholly obliterated, but it can be largely reduced by a restriction of the reproduction of those who are themselves socially inadequate.
TWO JUKE HOMES OF THE PRESENT DAY
Fig. 28.—The Jukes have mostly been country-dwellers, a fact which has tended to increase the amount of consanguineous marriage among them. Removal into a new environment usually does not mean any substantial change for them, because they succeed immediately in re-creating the same squalid sort of an environment from which they came. In the house below, one part was occupied by the family and the other part by pigs. Photographs from A. H. Estabrook.
Alike then on biological, humanitarian and financial grounds, the nation would be the better for a diminution in the production of physically, mentally or morally defective children. And the way to secure this diminution is to prevent reproduction by parents whose offspring would almost certainly be undesirable in character.
Granted that such prevention is a proper function of society, the question again arises whether it is an ethically correct procedure to allow these potentially undesirable parents to marry at all. Should they be doomed to perpetual celibacy, or should they be permitted to mate, on condition that the union be childless.