from which they come. There are sixty of these Prisoners' Aid Societies in England and Wales-practically one for every local and Convict Prison. In 1911 they aided 41,812 discharged prisoners. They are under the patronage of the Government, the money allowed the prisoner for his labor being turned over to them, as we have seen, to be used by them for the prisoner's benefit at their discretion. In 1913 the combined income of the Societies was in excess of $120,000.00, of which nearly $50,000.00 came from the Government. The best of these societies not only find employment for discharged prisoners, and assist them by grants of money and clothing, but also have connected with them industrial homes for ex-convicts where they can receive training which will fit them to re-enter free social life. They thus continue the work of the reformation of the prisoner after his discharge.

A word in conclusion regarding the civil service in English prisons. Subordinate officers are appointed from a list who have passed the examination of the Civil Service Commission, and after an examination by high prison officials into their antecedents which is very searching. They enter the service in the lowest positions, are promoted strictly according to merit, and are not in danger of removal unless they deserve it. Those adapted to the work spend their lives in it, and may retire at a certain age with a pension. In one or two of the larger prisons there have recently been started special schools to train qualified persons for the prison service. The governors, or superintendents, however, of the prisons are appointed upon a different basis. They are usually ex-army or navy officers. Their tenure is for life or during competence, however, and politics cannot be said to play any part in the administration. All of the prisons of England and Wales are under the control of a board of Prison Commissioners, of which Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise is at present the competent head. This board is directly responsible for the whole administration of the prisons, and its work is checked up by a separate board of Inspectors of Prisons.

It is not necessary to point out in detail the defects of the English prison system, since our purpose has been rather to see what we can learn from it. Among the more obvious defects are the lack of the indeterminate sentence, the prevalence of short sentences for habitual misdemeanants, and the relatively undeveloped condition of the system of industrial reformatories for first offenders. On the other hand, let us note the following lessons which we Americans might well learn from the English Prison System:

1. That the jails or local prisons of a State should be under state,

and not under local, control, and that they should be coordinated with the other penal institutions by being brought under one common central board of control.

2. That the reformatory spirit, instead of being confined to one or two institutions, should permeate the entire prison system, both for minor and major offenders, expressing itself in the progressive grading and classification of all prisoners, in proper facilities for labor and education in all prisons, and in conditional release.

3. That the prison labor problem is easily soluble, both for local jails and central prisons, by a proper combination of the State Use, Public Works, and State Farm Systems, without appreciable competition with free labor outside of prison walls.

4. That if we want good prisons we must free them from partisan politics, by securing a civil service law which will put the appointment and promotion of their officials strictly upon a merit basis.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS FOR THE DIAGNOSIS

OF FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS.

RUDOLF PINTNER AND DONALD G. PATERSON.1

A real study of the feeble-minded and a clear differentiation of this group from the demented, the psychopathic and other allied groups is of comparatively recent date. In the growth of this study. we may note a gradual change in viewpoint from the more strictly medical aspect, which regarded idiocy and imbecility rather in the light of a disease entity, to the psychological aspect, in which the lack of intelligence is the main difference between the feeble-minded and the normal. So that at the present time feeble-mindedness is looked upon almost entirely as representing merely a difference in the amount of intelligence possessed by the feeble-minded individual as contrasted with the normal individual, and the medical point of view, though by no means subordinate, is relegated to those cases where a specific disease may be the cause of the lack of development of intelligence. These cases are much less common than was previously supposed, since it is now recognized that the vast majority of feeble-minded individuals are those that have not developed normally from birth. This change in viewpoint is due to the great progress made by psychology in the measurement of intelligence. The psychology of individual differences, and the psychology of tests is enabling us more and more accurately to measure differences in intelligence among individuals, and we are now for the most part basing our diagnosis of feeble-mindedness upon the results of tests.

If this is so, it seems well to discuss the basis upon which our tests of differences in intelligence rest. What right have we to call an individual feeble-minded as a result of intelligence tests? The usual answer to this is that if the individual tests two, three or four years backward, as the case may be, on some intelligence scale, or if he fails to reach a certain age level or degree of intellectual development, he is to be regarded as feeble-minded. This is taken to be a sufficient diagnosis by many investigators. Others, desiring to assume a more cautious and conservative stand, will always qualify the above by insisting that other tests in addition to the usual scales must be taken into account, and hinting that there are other criteria besides tests. Characteristic of this position is the following

1Of the Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, Columbus.

quotation, "A mental age of 10 or above is not necessarily indicative of feeble-mindedness, regardless of how old the examinee may be, and a young child may test almost at age and yet be feeble-minded as determined by other criteria." Search for these other tests and other criteria often proves futile or results in unearthing some test, that has been very inadequately, if at all, standardized, upon which the investigator pins much faith, although the significance of any specific performance of the test seems much less than that of the performance of the well standardized tests included in the scales. If the fallacy of this position is pointed out, there is still another position to which the conservative worker may retreat and in which he remains well entrenched, and this is his knowledge of the feeble-minded as a class, the experience he has accumulated in associating with them and in studying them in their daily lives. The value of such experience is, of course, inestimable, but it is questionable whether judgments. based upon it can ever supplant the more accurate measurements of intelligence as derived from psychological tests. Such experience can never lead to the finer differentiations of grades of intelligence, nor is it often by itself of much account when a diagnosis has to be arrived at quickly. Furthermore, it is to be noted, that it is the result of experience gained among a group of individuals that has already been diagnosed as feeble-minded by other workers in the first place and since opinions. as to feeble-mindedness, particularly of the so-called higher grades, differ somewhat in different institutions, we may very well conceive of different concepts of feeble-mindedness being arrived at according to the type of institution in which the individual may have acquired his experience.

All these methods of diagnosis are based upon empirical knowledge of a group of individuals which we have come to call feebleminded. Before we had any psychological tests, an individual was diagnosed as an idiot or imbecile because he resembled others who had been so designated previously. After the advent of the psychological scale we found by empirical means that two or three or four years retardation existed in individuals who resembled the group of individuals that society had been designating feeble-minded. The empiricism. of this procedure is clear from the shifting opinions in regard to the amount of retardation necessary before a valid diagnosis of feeblemindedness could be made. To take the Binet-Simon scale as an example, we find at first that a retardation of three years is said to be

2Informal Conference on the Binet-Simon Scale: Some Suggestions and Recommendations. J. of Ed. Psych. Vol. V, 1914, p. 95.

diagnostic of feeble-mindedness. Later we are told that below the age of nine, two years retardation is indicative of feeble-mindedness, and above that age, three years. Then again some workers would diagnose as feeble-minded those three years retarded below the age of nine and four years retarded above nine. The dividing line between feeble-mindedness and normality for older children and adults has been variously placed at 12, 11 or 10. All these changes mean that we have been trying to fit the scale to the actual existing conditions. We have a vague notion of what is meant by a feeble-minded individual and in order to use our scales for diagnostic purposes we have been finding out what those who are ordinarily termed feebleminded accomplish on the scale and employing these results in turn to diagnose new cases. This is, of course, entirely natural and necessary in our search for a more definite concept of feeble-mindedness and a more definite means for measuring the same.

Is it the only way? It seems to us that we can at this stage approach the subject from another viewpoint, and that we are now ready for a more definite psychological concept of feeble-mindedness based upon the underlying theory of the measurement of intelligence. The underlying hypothesis is that, given a sufficiently large number of individuals, they will distribute themselves in regard to degrees of intelligence upon a normal curve. The larger the number of individuals, the closer will their distribution conform to a normal distribution. Assuming this hypothesis to be correct, it is our purpose here to see what results will follow in applying it to the classification of individuals according to the degree of their intelligence. At the very outset the assumption of such a hypothesis gives us an excellent means for deciding upon certain groups of individuals. We may adopt a three-, four-, five- or n-fold classification according to the accuracy of our measuring rod. At the present time a five-fold classification would seem the most feasible, because we already differentiate between the feeble-minded, backward, normal and supernormal. To these there ought to be added a fifth group at the upper end of our distribution corresponding in size to the lowest group of feeble-minded. Just what the percentages of these groups should be is, of course, purely arbitrary, but we may make certain assumptions, i. e., that fifty per cent lie in the middle or normal group and twenty-five per cent above and twenty-five per cent below, and that these two groups of twenty-five per cent again may each be divided into a larger and a smaller group containing twenty-two per cent and three per cent 'Goddard, H. H. Discussion on a paper by Kuhlmann. J. of Psycho-Asthenics. Vol. XVI, 1912, p. 192.