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It could be your next baby -- feeblemindedness strikes in the finest families. Yet thousands of such children and adults still live almost like animals in inferior institutions. With proper care and training many of them could learn to take respected and self-supporting places in society.

I HAVE never been so aware of the horror and waste resulting from man's inhumanity to man as I was when visiting our state institutions for the feeble-minded. To see men, women and children whose mental ages run from virtually zero to eight years -- all children, really -- kept at a helpless, often repulsive animal level is an ugly sight.

Even uglier is the realization that uncounted numbers of human beings with mental ages of eight to twelve and higher needlessly stagnate in these institutions. With a few years' training and supervision they might be sent out into the community to lead happy self-supporting lives. But most of our seventy-eight state institutions for mental deficients are not training schools -- they are little more than wretched zoos.

I have visited many of these institutions across the country. I have read detailed official surveys of others. I have seen mental deficients of all grades. The crib cases, so mentally and physically damaged from birth that they seem to be mere inert organisms. And the well-set-up institutional helpers who are superficially indistinguishable from many a self-supporting person you meet every day. I have talked with psychiatrists, psychologists, educators and nurses. And I have found out the sickening truth: do-nothingness is the rule in most institutions. No one knows just how many children could be salvaged from this human scrap heap -- because so few places have tried.

Come with me to schools in typical states, bearing in mind that we are not seeing the mentally ill whose once sound minds have gone wrong, like a cracked wall. We are visiting the mentally deficient, whose minds have never fully developed, like a wall left unfinished. We are actually seeing children -- all these individuals, whatever their chronological age, are children mentally. We are seeing children, but few toys, no cheerful playrooms, no bright pictures, little to make a child happy.

We come first to an institution in a central state -- a region of fertile land, magnificent estates and luxurious hotels. But the institution's main four-story building was put up in the 1880's. A dilapidated wooden shack shelters its most crippled helpless patients. The only new building is a pretty little white cannery. Around a small desolate outdoor play yard is a gray splintered wooden wall, once white.

Built for four hundred and fifty, the institution houses seven hundred. Beds are so tightly packed that the head of one touches the foot of the next. And nothing else in the bedrooms except an array of mops in two dormitories and a can of talcum powder and an artificial flower on a window sill in another. Some of the girls who work at night were asleep in shadeless daylight glare.

The girls' playroom -- toyless -- boasted double rows of wooden benches along the walls. Some children could not find room even on these and were sprawled on the floor. The boys' playroom was made even dimmer by gray paint on the lower panes of barred windows. In the playroom for the most backward boys -- called the low-grade boys -- I saw exactly one plaything: a string of spools around an old man's neck. In the playroom for brighter boys -- the high-grades, most of them young -- were a set of jacks, a torn comic book and a few tin dolls' dishes.

"When they're herded like cattle, there isn't much you can do for them," the superintendent remarked despairingly. He deplored his inability to group his charges by either mental or chronological age and I shuddered at seeing Ned and Bobbie, two lively eleven-year-olds, living among adult imbeciles.

Such lumping together is destructive. The young pick up bad habits from the old -- not the least, of them, deplorable physical practices which, thanks to idleness and jam-packing, are virtually uncontrollable. And the brighter sink to the level of the duller.

But I did not see the playrooms at their worst until mealtime. Children considered incapable of going to the dining-room were fed in the playroom. Overworked attendants dished food out of chipped enamel containers and tried to feed the most infantile. The other children either half-sat at tables, wolfing their food from spoons or cupped hands, or ate while pacing the narrow lane between the tables and the wall benches.

Conditions weren't much better in the dining-room for the brighter children. These children receive no table training. The only utensils were spoons, and here as in every other state training school I visited, there were no napkins. When a child empties his plate and wants seconds the food remaining on some other child's plate is dumped onto his.

Little more is done with schooling. Some of the brightest children get only two hours of teaching a day -- one hour manual, one academic. When I visited the academic class for girls only four were present. "The girls who work in the kitchen sometimes don't get off for school," the teacher apologized. At another unit of the institution I was told the school day was five hours. I walked in on what was called library hour. One dull-looking girl was rapidly thumbing over the pages of an unillustrated magazine of which she was obviously not reading one word. Two were engaged with comic books. The rest were doing handwork.

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To house, clothe, feed and educate its feebleminded and provide them with medical care, this state allows one dollar per person a day. Attendants' wages start at a hundred dollars a month, minus twenty-one dollars for maintenance. Nearly all are elderly and since they are on duty from five-thirty A.M. to five-thirty P.M. six days a week, it is no wonder that all are tired.

Further east, near a city of beautiful parks and show places, is another training school, somewhat more generously, but still penuriously, supported. Here too were shocking conditions.

During lunch at the superintendent's table I became acquainted with Nellie, a pretty young patient who was our waitress. Later I found that Nellie roomed with the middle-aged imbeciles -- and these were her potential girl friends.

I found that a white-haired woman was the only attendant for fifty-nine babies and the helpless low-grade crippled boys of all ages. To care for her charges she had to get help from some of the brighter patients -- as was the practice nearly everywhere I went. Once while the attendant was busy elsewhere, I saw a helper yank pajamas off a baby who had wet himself, dump the naked youngster on the floor and leave him there while he changed the bed.

In the dayroom a child was lying on his side in a four-foot high wooden-floored cage of chicken wire. The attendant explained that the little fellow liked to be with other children. But as he couldn't move about she was afraid he'd be stepped on; so she had rigged up the cage for him. I was touched by her kindly intentions. But I wondered why a rich community couldn't provide better accommodations for the child.

Let us visit another training school located on spacious grounds near a large industrial city. The exterior of the school buildings is fairly attractive, but inside the rooms are dilapidated and barren. Even the high-grade girls' dining-room has no curtains, though they could be made inexpensively by the girls in their sewing-room. Lavatories look antiquated and unsanitary. All have roller towels -- against the law in public washrooms in that state. Some wards even have a common drinking cup.

Beds are close-packed, as everywhere. In one ward four rows of them stretched from wall to wall to accommodate more than seventy bedridden women. The only paid employee on duty was an eighty-year-old woman who works a twelve-hour shift. "If there were only room for chairs, lots of these patients could be out of bed at least part of the day," she told me. As it is, the patients have lain idle for years.

Near by is a similar ward in the making. Here are the younger physical cripples. They too spend their time in bed. Their view of life is what they can see between the bare bars of their cribs. The prospects of their ever walking seem dim. In this institution the proportion of bedridden seemed overwhelmingly higher than in any other institution I visited. The better places have demonstrated that the more patients are encouraged to be mentally alive and out of bed -- if only to crawl on the floor or be propped in chairs -- the fewer remain as permanent crib cases.

Equally dim, I felt, is the outlook for the moral and social rehabilitation of the young girls who help care for these babies. All of the girls are bright enough to be trained to lead useful lives. Some, indeed, are borderline cases (70-80 IQ) committed by juvenile courts as delinquents. During school vacations their training consists of working on this ward twelve hours a day. Of course a certain amount of experience in caring for children is excellent training and in addition gives a girl the needed sense, and satisfaction, of doing for others. But such harsh peonage threatens to make already antisocial girls more likely than ever to be behavior problems.

A few training schools add to the insult of abandoned hope the injury of jail-like discipline. Institutional regimentation is crushing enough for normal children; for mental deficients, with less initiative to begin with, it is doubly devastating.

In the midwest is an institution with modern buildings and an educational director who really wants to do well by his children. But indoors and outdoors the place looks like a prison. Porches are heavily barred. Stone floors are rugless. The walls are of tile and there are no pictures or plants in any of the dormitories or dayrooms.

The brighter girls -- known as the working girls -- jumped up and stood like soldiers at attention when we entered their dayroom. The matron in charge showed us what she called "the jail" -- three small rooms with peephole doors, each room furnished with a bed only.

Talking at meals is forbidden. Even the high-grade small boys ate in silence. When they ranted seconds, they held their plates high above their heads. This is the training they get for the ways of the outside world.

In the day room of a locked "security" building I found a handsome blond boy of about twenty curled on the floor.

"Is he sick?" I inquired.

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"Oh no," the attendant said. "Jimmie likes to lie there."

"You don't look very comfortable, Jimmie," I said. Jimmie grinned, sat up and pulled a stub of pencil out of his overalls.

"Would you like some paper?" I asked. He nodded eagerly so I pulled some blank pages out of my notebook and gave them to him.

"Jimmie can't write," said the attendant.

"Well, he can have fun scribbling," I replied, thinking of the reams of paper my own children had happily covered with scrawls during their preschool days. And Jimmie did have fun scribbling. Not only that, he began behaving quite normally. He pulled a chair up to a table and sat down.

LATER, when I told this story to Dr. Charles A. Zeller, Director of the Indiana Council of Mental Hygiene, his indignant comment was, "And maybe Jimmie could have been taught to write!"

For this institution of fifteen hundred there are two doctors, without a single graduate nurse to assist them. In the hospital building I did not even see the two doctors. One, I learned, was on vacation. The superintendent didn't know where the other was. The sixty-odd epileptics in the place do not get the modern medication that can largely control seizures. But when the people of a state are willing to spend only a dollar and ten cents a day for each child -- exclusive of clothing -- you cannot expect the children to get the benefits of modern medical science.

You can't expect good teaching, either. Most of the teachers in this school are unlicensed.

Little or no education is the rule rather than the exception in state training schools. Here are some typical facts gleaned from the United States Public Health surveys:

In a western school there is only one teacher, who has other duties, for three hundred children. In another western school "no educational and training program." In a southern institution's school only sixty to ninety minutes a day, four days a week, with only one of the two teachers at all qualified. In another southern institution of three hundred and fifty only three children in the school can read; the one teacher is also responsible for recreation, "of which there is very little." A southwestern school has two teachers for twelve hundred and fifty; when the present superintendent took over a few years ago she found attempts were being made to teach mental deficients algebra!

Even at the Mansfield State Training School in Connecticut, where the quality of teaching is superb, of six hundred children who might benefit by teaching only two hundred and fifty can be taught for one hour a day each because the schoolhouse won't hold more. A new schoolhouse is being built.

From these facts, you well may ask: What chance does a backward child have of getting the training that would enable him to go out and lead a normal life in the community?

Throughout the country I also observed many evidences of what is politely called restraint. At one place an epileptic boy was lying in a strait jacket, though doctors say movement should be free during seizures. Elsewhere I came across two small girls tied like dogs on leashes, one end of a rope around their waists, the other attached to a hook on the walls. "It keeps them from getting hurt," I was informed. I did not visit, but read an official report on a western state training school where one little girl was chained in bed and many children were confined in steel cages.

At one school I was appalled to learn that the brighter boys and girls are sometimes disciplined by being placed in "untidy" wards -- wards for low-grade children unable to control their natural functions. And I was still more appalled when I later learned from a psychiatrist with wide institutional experience that this practice, not only cruel but dangerously likely to cause the breakdown of good habits, is fairly common.

Even in the better places children are not outdoors enough. Whenever I commented on the numbers locked in wards or cottages, I'd be told: "Oh, but they do go out in summer." Or, "This is exceptional -- ordinarily they'd be out working." Or, "They're out every fine day." It so happened that it was not raining any day I was visiting training schools and sometimes the weather was pleasantly warm. Apparently the interpretation of a fine day is a narrow one.

Girls are even more confined and repressed than are boys, as a rule. In one institution the girls are kept behind a barbed wire fence, while the boys are free to roam the grounds. At another, the boys have a recreational hall where they can bowl, play pool and table tennis and purchase refreshments. Softball games are engaged in by more than fifty boys at least five evenings a week. But in the school's annual report, the older girls' recreation was dismissed with a single statement: "During the summer months many of the girls who are physically able are taken for walks in the late evening."

If girls are to be prepared to make their way in the world, they must have the opportunity to mingle socially -- under supervision of course -- with the opposite sex. I found that a few of the best state training schools do get their brighter boys and girls together at chaperoned parties or dances. But elsewhere the paths of boys and girls never cross. Perhaps even worse than keeping the two sexes completely segregated is allowing them continually to catch tantalizing glimpses of one another without ever permitting them to meet.

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Dr. Neil A. Dayton, Superintendent of the Mansfield State Training School in Connecticut, told me his ideas on this subject. "We aid adjustment in the school by letting the girls mingle socially now and then with the boys, at supervised dances and parties. Then, when they go outside on parole they are not overly excited by contacts with the opposite sex.

"In the community we give them careful social-service supervision. The families with whom they are placed are instructed not to let them go out alone. It is a while before we permit them to have boy friends. But over a period of time, our social service workers gradually relax supervision and allow a girl to take over more and more responsibility until she is finally leading a normal social life.

"We have had very little difficulty with our paroled girls. During the last six or seven years there have been three illegitimate babies. As several hundred young women are involved, it would seem to be a better record than has been made by the community in general. Not one girl discharged over the past ten years has been in sex difficulties."

MANY boys and girls have been successfully trained and paroled by the better institutions. If a child's health, personality, work habits, ability to handle money, self-control, self-confidence and, above all, his ability to get along with other people have been built up with about three to five years' training, he can adjust in the community about as well as brighter folk.

Records of the North Jersey Training School for girls show that during the last nineteen years about sixty per cent of all persons admitted have gone out to live success fully in the community. Other good schools have relatively good records. Among a hundred and sixty-two now on parole from the District of Columbia Training School are a manager of a chain store earning fifty-five dollars a week, a supervisor of a group of laundry workers, a cafeteria counter waitress, baker's helper, a maid in a well-to-do home and a hospital kitchen worker with a civil service rating. In Connecticut a boy with low IQ earns forty-five dollars a week and a girl with an even lower IQ earns thirty-five.

Why, then, do so many schools clutch children tight for life? One reason is that they lack facilities for personnel and training the charges. But there is apparently another more shocking reason: the children are useful in the institutions.

"I'm sure over twenty per cent of the high-grades now in state training schools could get out and get along if they weren't so useful," said a state official who asked me not to quote him by name. And many administrators admitted: "We couldn't run the place without the working children."

One southern training school has girls working in its laundry from seven A.M. to seven P.M. The superintendent of a border-state school told me, " I'd have to hire ten men to do the work of the farm boys." Three of the boys he referred to were intelligent enough to run a tractor. Often superintendents' wives are reluctant to let capable houseworkers go. "I like to keep them as long as I can," one woman remarked to me naively.

To give children a real preparation for getting along in the world, they should be moved from one chore to another. In this way they can acquire increasingly difficult skills and the assurance that comes from knowing you can succeed at more than one task. Eventually they can be paroled to take outside jobs.

Social workers are essential for a successful program of parole. Keeping an eye on children placed out, watching their environments, and counseling for a period are almost as important as prior training within the school. Yet more state training schools don't have workers than have them.

No wonder one superintendent talked fearfully to me of parole. He had made a few attempts at placing out boys and girls. They got into trouble or were exploited and had to be taken back. Like other superintendents who have had similar experiences, he now thinks it safer to keep his children locked up, although they are potential assets to the community.

Some of the children who spend their lives behind training school doors that don't open outward should never have been committed in the first place. Feeble-mindedness is a complex matter of mind, personality and social adjustment. The haphazard careless way in which children are committed is shocking. Even a low IQ established by a more or less competent psychologist does not mean that institutionalization is really necessary. Yet some states are satisfied with commitment by a jury trial. Some accept certificates of one or two physicians who may know little or nothing about mental deficiency. In the many institutions where there is no staff psychologist, a brief conversation with the superintendent may be all that determines whether a child is placed in a low-grade or high-grade unit or, indeed, whether he really belongs in the institution at all.

THE psychologist at Southbury Training School in Connecticut, which carefully tests and retests, told me that within sixteen months he had found at least fifteen mistakes in outside diagnoses of mental deficiency. Some children, originally testing low during an emotional disturbance, had recovered and were really dull normals. Surely it would be cheaper in the long run to support good psychological service in all our state training schools than to continue to support people who might be supporting themselves.

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Low-grade mental deficients are unlikely ever to become community assets. But I believe that if American women could see what I have seen they would not want to skimp on their care. Take, for instance, what the superintendent of one midwestern institution called "our nudist colony."

"We keep some boys in here who just won't stay dressed," the attendant said. She threw open a door and I was confronted with half a dozen naked adults confined in a damp lavatory. They were fed there too, the attendant told me, from the washbasins that run trough-like along the center. "We wash them out," she hastened to explain.

One of the poor creatures still had enough human initiative to dash into the dayroom. "Get in there!" the attendant exclaimed and he scuttled back.

My visit to Woodbine State Colony, New Jersey, was evidence to me that such conditions need not be. Woodbine is an institution exclusively for low-grade mental deficients. The average mental age of its some eight hundred boys is two years and two months. Precisely as E. L. Johnstone, its superintendent, has written: "The Colony is a world in slow motion, geared to provide a maximum of happiness and joy to the Least of These." To me, he said, when I asked whether I could prove to American women that it paid to teach these children: "I cannot possibly give an economic justification for what we do here. But the reasons for helping these handicapped children to fulfill themselves as much as possible within their limitations are so profound they don't need explanation." He was right. The reasons are spiritual, in the deepest sense of the word.

More than once tears came to my eyes at Woodbine. The attractive table set for the boys in the "best" cottage -- the brightest having a five-year-old mentality -- and the contented mannerly way in which they ate contrasted poignantly with what I had seen at mealtimes elsewhere. There were the little boys in nursery school and their delighted expressions when we applauded their clap-clap dance. There was the middle-aged boy, with a two-year intelligence, who beamingly showed me a piece of embroidery "I'm making for my mama." The eighteen-year-old with an eighteen-month-old's intelligence and lack of speech but an adult's coordination, who found peace and satisfaction in weaving. The pride of the children who had their regular jobs such as shining shoes or pouring milk or shoveling ashes or weeding.

Here the playrooms are real playrooms -- gay with murals inexpensively made by outlining projected lantern slides and letting the children fill in the colors. Flowered paper draperies hang at the windows. On all the sun porches are bright pots of plants.

By means of massage, simple exercises and a consistent policy of "Get them out of bed!" crib cases become walkers. "When I came here," an attendant told me, "twenty of the boys were in bed. Now all but two walk. And," she added emphatically, "those two are going to walk too." Soiling is well under control; children who do not talk have been taught to raise their hands, utter a sound or press their stomachs to indicate a need to go to the bathroom. One youngster, so damaged that the only motion he could make was to contract his fingers, learned to press a rubber whistle as his signal. Surely no mother would settle for less decent humane care for her baby if he were not like other children.

Mental deficients such as those at Woodbine must probably be institutionalized all their lives. But thousands of others -- at present more than a hundred and nine thousand children are in state training schools -- are being institutionalized much longer than necessary. At the same time, scores of mental deficients are kept on waiting lists, often for years.

"If we had the facilities to train children properly and keep them moving out," I was told several times, "we mightn't need more buildings." Meanwhile families are intolerably burdened with the care of the helpless; mental deficients vegetate in jails and almshouses because there is no other place for them to go; and more than ten thousand known to be mentally well are in state hospitals for the mentally sick. At least one state makes no provision at all for feeble-minded Negroes.

Even the ideal institution, however, is not the whole answer to caring for mental deficients. The reasons they must be institutionalized are various and usually have as much to do with their family circumstances as with their IQ's. But most of those who are mentally subnormal, according to Dr. Elise Martens of the United States Office of Education, would get along quite well living at home if communities provided special teaching, guidance clinics, recreation centers and supervision.

HERE and there are promising projects for the care of mental deficients outside institutions. Placement with foster families has been successful in a few states. In a small-scale experiment in New Jersey, a teacher works with a child and parents when a child is on the waiting list. I went with her to several homes where there were Mongolian idiots, born, as they always are, to normal parents, most of whom have other normal children. And they were happy homes. So well have the children come along within their limitations, so much better adjusted have the families become to the child, that of twenty-four who had children on the waiting list seventeen have decided not to institutionalize even should a bed become available.

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Our state training-school classrooms, instead of being so often a refuge for incompetents, should be training grounds for remedial teachers working in special classes outside the institution as well as those working in it. Classes should be under the supervision of the state educational department, like other schools.

"No state, without exception," says Dr. L. N. Yepsen, president of the American Association on Mental Deficiency, "has a really satisfactory, well-integrated and coordinated program for its mental deficients."

The whole situation is so deplorable that the steps to remedy it must inevitably be slow and many. And it will never fully clear up until the state training school ceases to be an isolated place of last resort, until it has a give-and-take relation with other facilities in the community. There is a way, however, that you can help immediately.

More money is the key to the problem, not only for more space but for more personnel and better qualified personnel. Without more money neither administrators nor attendants in make improvements. American women in demand that their state legislatures neatly increase appropriations, must be willing to pay a few cents extra for taxes that will insure children in all state training schools real training and good care. The investment will pay off well -- not only in spiritual satisfaction but in actual salvage of human beings.

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