give there, go home and make very creditable citizens in their modest way.

I do hope that we can get a social worker to follow our children up. It is not necessary for the state to care for certain of these children indefinitely.

I would like to have Miss Mary Diemer tell of her work in the Des Moines public schools.

Miss Diemer: I always enjoy coming to these meetings because I need inspiration and always get it here. I appreciate the kind help that the superintendents and employes of the state have given me from time to time. I started out in this work nine years ago in the city and I had a good many ideas that I do not have today, as several of you have said that you have changed your minds. But I am not discouraged as I know that the state institutions cannot take care of all who need care. A great many, however, do not need institutional care if they can be cared for on the outside. Perhaps two per cent of our school population needs segregation, and I think Doctor Goddard's estimate is two per cent of those in the first six grades of our schools.

We started out by giving the Binet tests and then later other tests and now we are giving the group tests. A year ago we gave a city wide intelligence test in school buildings, and it is very interesting to know how the buildings vary in intelligence. Sometimes the sixth grade from one building does the work of the fourth grade in another building and in transferring children, that has been a great help to us.

We do not take these results as the last word. I have spent most of my time working out the different tests, finding out the best to use. We now have our high five per cent located and our low five per cent. That is very helpful to us for various reasons. We are trying to segregate them for special help in various ways. We have one special school accepting and handling seventy-five children. Next year two two-room schools will be opened taking care of thirty-five or forty. Owing to finances, we must take more than the original fifteen children. The we have several other single rooms. My idea is to segregate them as early as possible and in that way it is a saving because the children will not get into habits of idleness and later on be

come discouraged, as they do if not segregated until they are fourteen years of age.

Of course feeblemindedness is a big problem but we have the mental hygiene side to be considered, speech cases, epilepsy, a great many children who are just unstable mentally and all of these are problems. We cooperate with the juvenile court the best we possibly can. We are organizing a system so that every child who comes into court may be thoroughly investigated from every standpoint. We have a card record of all tests that have ever been given to the child, and more complete school information, and so each year we try to improve.

I want to thank the superintendents for their hearty cooperation with us in this work.

Superintendent Witte: Many of the things complained of by those on the inside looking out against those on the outside looking in are inherent in the work itself. The institutions under the board of control, more especially, those of remedial and correctional character, are established and maintained in order to supply a painful need, to correct a distressing thing. And it is a healthy tendency of human nature that we find in the normal individual, to dwell on what is pleasant and forget what is distressing and painful. We must bear this in mind when we put ourselves in the place of the public looking in.

The average individual has no particular interest in us or the desire of closer acquaintance with us. This is the tendency of the healthy mind in the public. But we find also (as a minority, of course) the individual who hunts up distressing things, and who is ever ready to believe the worst of his fellowmen and the worst he can get out of the situation; who is also inclined to make himself prominent, and with little or no information endeavors to draw the attention of people generally. He or she also is the one who endeavors with more or less success to mould popular notions concerning state institutions. This is unfortunate, but cannot be changed; and therefore we must accept it as part of the day's work. The matter of having the public generally become acquainted with the work the state is doing in behalf of its unfortunate is certainly to be encouraged.

We, as at Glenwood, have striven to have our immediate

neighbors our friends, and have also tried to make friends of visitors who come from a distance. Everybody is welcome at Clarinda, providing they do not come from idle curiosity or after hours at night. There are popular ideas concerning the treatment of the insane, which are held as an inheritance from the past. Many people still look for medieval conditions in a state hospital for the care and cure of insane people. And when these people come to visit us, they look for all sorts of horrors that do not exist, except perhaps in the disordered imagination of some patient, who has gone home not cured.

These people seem disappointed when we cannot show them. people shackled by hand and leg to the cement floor or wall. And when we tell them that nothing of the kind is in use, either here or as far as we know in other hospitals, they look upon us with suspicion, and no doubt many go away looking upon us as lineal descendants of Ananias and Sapphira.

However, many kind and thoughtful men and women are interested in the insane from purely social and philanthropic motives. We are always glad to welcome these people, since they are the leaven which must leaven the mass and remove from the public its ancient prejudices and erroneous ideas.

Superintendent Von Krog: I appreciate the way this paper has been received. One thought that Doctor Mogridge brought out, was not especially that I did not know they were sending them out, these thoughts were more the thoughts of the public. Many things have been brought to my attention in these two conferences that I have attended that I did not know. While my work is different than that of most of the people here, I believe we have some people at Eldora who will always be state charges and who will go on from Eldora to Fort Madison and some will be transferred to other institutions.

We have had four or five kept in a room by themselves, giving them fresh air, who really should have been in another institution. This is response in advance to the thought Doctor Scarborough voiced this morning.

The parole agents are people who can do very much good. If it works as well elsewhere as it does at our institution, I believe we might have the same system of paroling men, and of insane, under the same board for the advanced populations

from Anamosa, Fort Madison and Rockwell City, as we are working under. As Superintendent Pettengill of Michigan used to say when talking to teachers, "You are all ringing bells." We ought to ring the rising bell in the dormitory of the soul of those we have in our charge. If we can really touch the hearts and minds of those who come to us, we will create a better sentiment among the public on the outside.

Chairman Strief: I will appoint as a program committee for the December meeting, Member McColl, Warden Baumei and Doctor Scarborough.

PROGRAM COMMITTEE REPORT.

The program committee reported the following as the prog.am for the next conference to be held in September, 1922: 1. The Child and the State,

By A. E. Kepford, Superintendent, Juvenile Home,
Toledo, Iowa.

2. Cooperation in Vocational Guidance,

By Reuel H. Sylvester, Ph.D., Des Moines Health
Center, Des Moines, Iowa.

3. Paper,

By H. V. Scarborough, Superintendent, State Sanatorium, Oakdale, Iowa.

4. Impressions and Expressions,

By Royal H. Holbrook, Iowa State College,

Ames, Iowa.

5. Raising the General Average,

By B. F. Cummings, Judge, 17th Judicial District,
Marshalltown, Iowa.

6. Institution Accounting,

By R. P. Bovey, Accountant, Board of Control of State
Institutions, Des Moines, Iowa.

The conference adjourned sine die.

REPORT OF NATIONAL MEETING ON FEEBLEMINDEDNESS.

George Mogridge, M. D., Superintendent, Institution for Feebleminded Children, Glenwood, Iowa.

I was in attendance at the forty-sixth session of the American Association for the Study of the Feebleminded, which was held in St. Louis, May 18th, 19th and 20th. The session was an extremely interesting one, as it noted some advance in thought in regard to the increasingly large class, and the many types that are now included under the heading of feebleminded.

The papers presented were contributed mainly by persons from eastern points, and naturally reflected conditions found by them in their sectior, but which differ in some respects from those found in Iowa. It was particularly noticeable that the so-called moron is being found in increasingly large numbers in the eastern seaboard states, and in some of the larger centers of the country, due, perhaps, to an unstable element of certain nationalities in recent immigration. The difficulty the eastern states have to contend with seems to be the delinquent defective. One thought was emphasized very emphatically, and that was that the defective delinquent, or the criminal with mental weakness, has no place whatever in the ordinary institution for the feebleminded as now established, and that some special provision is imperatively needed to care for these in separate and distinct institutions; such institutions to le of semi-penal character, with means for control and discipline. These cases are mostly young adults and attention of the authorities is usually drawn to them on account of criminalistic acts. It was the opinion of those who have made a study of them, that no amount of instruction would prove to be effective in a reformative way, and to house them, as the eastern institutions are often compelled to, with the purely feebleminded-those with benign dispositions and not tinged with criminalistic taints, was unfair to both classes, and resulted in no good to either one or the other; in fact, the mixture of these two widely differing types was fraught with evil to both.

Fortunately, the population of our own state is not such at the present time as to give rise to any very acute condition in this respect. Our population is not made up of such a heterogeneous mass as that of the eastern states, and we are fortunate in not having any very large centers of population, among which, it would seem, the defective delinquents usually are found.

However, it has occurred to me that we have, in our own state, this problem in a mild degree, as shown by investigations which have been made into the mental status of certain of those in our penal and reformative institutions, and from a personal knowledge of some who have been