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I have your letter of November 2 and am surprised and sorry to see the way in which the talk before the Dairymen's Wives was headed in the Free Press. I have not seen the account itself. Something happened that prevented my getting hold of that copy of the Free Press.
Thank you very kindly for putting your views in regard to modern attitude towards feeblemindedness so fully before me. I appreciate the trouble and time that you took in the midst of your busy life to write the letter. I think I have very much the same attitude towards the subject, appreciating fully the complexity of feeblemindedness, and I try to make it plain whenever I have anything to say for publication that the whole matter is very involved and that no one measure or program can be expected to do more than make a beginning in some small corner of the problem as a whole. It is perfectly obvious that many cases of feeblemindedness have no evidence of an hereditary character. It seems quite conclusive from the charts that we have been making up during the past year that a great many other cases are found repeating the same defective conditions one generation after another. If this is not heredity it is a repetition of the same environment which really amounts to very much the same thing so far as present available measures are concerned. In my own mind I am inclined to make less and less of the distinction between heredity and environment as a cause of defectiveness, so long as it is beyond the possibility of the institutions and agencies in the State to segregate all those who are defective, thereby changing their environment, or to transplant them and so eliminate or reduce the causes of defectiveness.
I shall be very happy to talk this matter over at greater length with you, and in the meantime I would assure you that I appreciate your calling my attention to the need of greater care in supervising the reports of any addresses. I used what seemed to me to be all due caution in warning the reporter present on this particular occasion to avoid anything that could possibly he construed as sensational or inaccurate. I do not believe for a minute that any of the ladies present at that gathering got the impression that I was condemning wholesale the parents of all feebleminded children to the category of defectiveness in themselves.
Assuring you that I shall always appreciate deeply any pains that you may take to call my attention to possible sources of misunderstanding, and indeed to any errors in my presentation of matters in which we are both deeply concerned, I beg to remain,
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