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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.