Should I declare that the problem of the feeble-minded is the largest single practical problem before Massachusetts at the present day, you might be disposed to wonder how practical a person I might be. Is not insanity a larger problem? Or alcoholism? Or syphilis?Or even that narrow circle of diseases dealt with by boards of health, the so-called public health problem ? Are not crime, graft, undesirable immigration, illiteracy larger problems? What also of the high cost of living, classes versus masses, anarchistic socialism? On still broader planes, one might pause to contemplate the lowering of moral standards, and the decay of religious thinking by the people at large. What chance has the problem of the feeble-minded with such problems as these and countless other problems of civilization?Perhaps I may justify my declaration, which smacks at first of such superlatives as are sometimes fed to legislative committees, as follows: By "problem" I do not mean an unsolvable problem or a set of conditions working out in saecula sacculorum, so that, if there be a problem, it would require philosophical or even divine wisdom to solve. By problem I mean something concrete, finite, practical, a set of conditions whose dimensions and quality are known or can shortly be known, for us in Massachusetts as well as for the angels in the sky. A problem, as I somewhat narrowly use the term, means a problem for solution, a problem that can by human means be solved.Insanity is a larger problem financially, perhaps, than feeble-mindedness. Within ten years or much less time, we shall know the comparative costs of the insane and the feeble-minded. Yet the facts of mental disease are of infinite complication beside those of feeble-mindedness.
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