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Residents might not only be worked like animals, it seemed, but also received about as much (or even less) medical care: Mastin (1916a, 1916b) and Swan (1908) boasted that medical expenses for over a year in one of the Massachusetts farm colonies was a total of less than one dollar for all 50 resident males combined. This stands quite in contrast to Fernald's earlier (1902, p. 489) description of a farm colony, prior to the cost squeeze: "They trap woodchucks, pick berries, gather nuts. They have their baseball nines and their football teams. They go coasting and skating in the winter and swimming in the brook in the summer. What more can a boy want?" (Fernald, 1902, p. 489).

There was much self-delusion and falsification of facts regarding maintenance costs, and I found it difficult to distinguish between claims as to how many residents were discharged as self-supporting; how many were considered potentially self-supporting in the community; what the maintenance costs were; and what the maintenance costs might have been. "Dr. Walter E. Fernald, of Massachusetts, in speaking on this subject, says: 'Not over 10 or 15 percent of our inmates can be made self-supporting, in the sense of going out into the community and securing and retaining a situation, and prudently spending their earnings. With all our training we cannot give our pupils that indispensable something known as good, plain common sense" (Carson, 1898, p. 295). The superintendent of Lapeer, Michigan, claimed: "Twenty-five percent of our inmates would be self-supporting if the work were put into their hands to do" (Polglase, 1900, p. 425). "Mr. Alex. Johnson says that in his institution 50 percent of his inmates are self-supporting" (Fox, 1900, p. 431).

"The proportion of the feeble-minded who may be made to earn their own living, under control, is variously estimated. The superintendents of at least two of the large training schools, both men of practical common sense, place the estimate as high as 50 percent of the whole number admitted. It is instructive to notice that estimates if this kind tend to become larger, especially as made by the managers of institutions which have a large acreage of farming and fruit-growing lands" (Johnson, 1898, p. 469).

"The cost of maintenance for mixed classes of patients in colonies after the population reaches 600 to 700 will be less than for the insane; while colonies for selected cases only should not require more than $75.00 to $80.00 a patient a year, and under ideal conditions even less" (Sprattling, 1903, p. 267).

"Build them up as high as you can, keep them where they are safe and will be industrious, and half of them, perhaps more than that, may be entirely self-supporting and no burden upon the tax-payer at all" (Johnson, 1905, p. 537). While records show that maintenance costs in Pennsylvania were about $175 a year, superintendent Kerlin was quoted as follows: "Dr. Kerlin tells me that, when they had three hundred inmates, it cost them twenty thousand dollars for expenses. Now, with seven hundred inmates, it does not cost any more. What does that mean? It means that the feeble-minded themselves are doing the work and helping to solve their own problems" (Barrows, 1888, p. 400). Even though Kerlin was probably misquoted, it is of significance that prominent workers in the field were ready to believe that costs were down to $29 per year. Fernald can be seen to be stretching the truth a bit in the following statement: "The average running expenses of these institutions have been gradually and largely reduced by this utilization of the industrial abilities of the trained inmates. At the Pennsylvania institutions the per capita cost of all the inmates has been reduced from $300 to a little over $100 per annum..." (1893, p. 218). The records showed Pennsylvania costs to vary from 152 to 175 between 1889 and 1894. Johnson (1900) and Bernstein (1918b) gave boastful papers on "self-sustaining" retardates even as the maintenance costs at Bernstein's institution (Rome, N.Y.) were $150 a year. A breakdown of the 1928 average maintenance costs of 24 farm colonies for males at Rome State School showed a range of $186-508, with a mean of $260 and a median of $232 (Davies, 1930, p. 225).

While retardates' work and development of farm colonies did not make the institutions self-sufficient, costs were, indeed, reduced, held constant, or held down to an astonishing degree. "Many years of experience have taught us economy of administration; and, while the efficiency of service is constantly increased, the cost of maintenance is gradually diminished. It will be found, after making due allowance for the number cared for and the difference in cost of supplies at various points, that the average per capita cost is remarkably uniform" (Wilmarth, 1902, p. 153).

Superintendents vied with each other in reducing cost, and aside from farming, another way to economize was to develop institutional architecture that was "plain but substantial": "The buildings themselves should be exceedingly plain and simple. What instrinsic -sic- reason is there for building more expensive structures than middle-class people build for their own dwellings in the same community?" (Fernald, 1902, p. 490). "Plain, substantial buildings, with modern sanitary toilet facilities, and of architectural beauty, but no filagrees, are what we need" (Johnstone, 1908, p. 323). "...Permanence in construction with low maintenance cost..." (Kirkbride, 1916, p.255). "The institution that we provide for the feeble minded should be constructed and maintained at a moderate cost. There has been a disposition to build marble palaces for the most degenerate members of the community..." (Cornell, 1915, p. 334).