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The method of test and discovery lies in a reasonable series of carefully devised experiments of management, -- the mark system, the indefinite sentence, and conditional parole. Under this plan the prisoner demonstrates his capacity of body, intellect, and character by his own conduct. All arbitrary and capricious standards are excluded. The man pronounces his own verdict in the product of his industry and in the history of his daily acts.

When the demonstration is complete and the repeater of crime has written his sentence of incapacity for freedom, another principle of law comes into view, -- the "progressive sentence." Deep down in this law is a social purpose of conscious selection. It is not retaliatory and blindly instinctive, it is not a blood-thirsty, savage growl for the life of a fellow-man; but it is a slowly acquired conviction, clarified by science, that our duty to posterity demands of us, in the measure of our power, the limitation of the line of criminals. Crime is not inherited but the defect which makes a criminal career probable may be inherited. Crime is taught, and the progressive sentence cuts off the number of instructors in the craft.

But the custodial confinement of the criminal does not exclude education. Even in the penitentiary we know no absolutely "incorrigible" class. To the end of his life the aged convict is still a pupil. So far as he has capacity, the State seeks to give him regular industry, books, teachers, chaplains, and all that is essential to make him a free man. This mortal life is too short, and our imperfect pedagogy is too defective, to let us know all that can be accomplished.

II. Defectives. -- Moving across the uncertain and shadowy borderland between crime and defect, we come to the region of the insane. Here, again, the social ends of education and selection are coming to control and direct all the parts and details of the systems of care. Sometimes one object is more conspicuous, and then the other; but in no single case is either excluded. So long as there is hope of cure, our States are lavish in expenditure. In those earlier years before alienists told us frankly that the sanguine hopes of restoring the chronic insane to normal health rested on a false basis of statistics and prognosis, our States invested fabulous sums in hospitals for those bereft of reason. The indigent shared with the wealthy in this bounty and eager expenditure.

But, when the sad and disappointing truth slowly spread over the professional and public mind, men began to think of prevention, of child-care, and of safe and humane custody. Not that any known means of care is neglected. Hope, cheer, and education are still provided for those who wearily wait in the dim starlight for the flash of restored reason.

In the case of the feeble-minded the principle of social selection may be said to control all methods. Everything is subordinated to the end of closing out the stock of a hopelessly degenerate line. We sometimes use the harsh word "extermination." But our system is based on an absolutely different motive from that which inspired the ancient and savage customs of infanticide and exposure. It is beautiful, though pathetic, to move about with the teachers of an asylum for the feeble-minded. Here all are "children," even when the wrinkles and stoop and grayness of advanced years betoken passage to adult life.

In this field we have an illustration of the social value of statistics and records which some so-called "practical" people affect to despise. The studies of families of degenerates in New York and Indiana may be cited as typical examples of the importance of exact and scientific histories of the wards of society, if we are to guide legislation by facts rather than by hasty guesses and crude speculation.

These studies seem at this hour to show us plainly that a vigorous policy of segregation of pronounced degenerates for two or three generations would reduce the defective stock to fairly manageable proportions. It must be remembered that degeneracy assumes many forms, and may appear in the various children of the same parents as inebriety, crime, insanity, idiocy, or mere futility. So closely are all members and institutions of society organically bound together that the treatment of the feeble-minded must affect every problem of poor relief, crime, insanity, intemperance.

Yet, while we aim at social selection by custody in asylums, we care for the individual. The imbecile is educated, as far as his slow brain can go, as thoroughly as the university candidate for the doctorate. Indeed, certain problems of the highest educational process can be studied in the school for the feeble-minded as in no other place. Who shall say in advance of trial that these institutions may not in the end contribute more to science and to the art of pedagogy than they have ever cost the States which support them ! Nothing is made in vain. No person is to be cast into the rubbish heap and declared useless. We must know more and delve deeper before we pronounce on that subject. Meantime we protect future society by providing that none of these unhappy children shall ever become parents, and yet that they shall be given, as far as possible, the rational pleasure and education of regular productive industry and instruction and social fellowship, not without gleams of happiness breaking through rifts in the clouds.