question of whether Jean is an imbecile until we agree upon the definition of imbecile. There are various ways of designating this type of individual. Imbecility, as used in law in this country, may be defined as “the state of mental defect existing from birth or from an early age, due to incomplete cerebral development, in consequence of which the person affected is unable to perform his duties as a member of society.” The high-grade imbecile, such as the person under discussion, feeble-minded as he is called in England, or the moron as we are coming to call him in the United States, is one who is “capable of earning a living under favorable circumstances, but is incapable from mental defect, existing from birth or from an early age, (a) of competing on equal terms with his normal fellows, or (b) of managing himself or his affairs with ordinary prudence.” These definitions were formulated by the Royal College of Physicians of England, and accepted by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded.

We may further designate this type of individual by saying that he has the mentality of a normal child of from three to twelve years of age. These age limits have been determined by examining thousands of the inmates of institutions for the feeble-minded and comparing with normal children. The inmates of the institutions are there because they were not capable of managing their own affairs with ordinary prudence, because society has discovered that they could not take care of themselves; they are weak-minded; they must be cared for by the public. Careful examination of such persons as have been determined by experience to be incapable of managing themselves shows that they range in intelligence, as before stated, from three to twelve years. There are practically none in these institutions that have a mentality above twelve. Those under three are called idiots.

Considered from the standpoint of the growth and the development of the child, we say that the imbecile is a case of arrested development; he has stopped growing mentally, and has stopped previous to the age of twelve, so that no matter what may be his actual age his mentality is that of a child under twelve years.

In the case of Jean Gianini, although he is sixteen years old, he has only the mentality of a child of ten. Or, if a possible error of two years were allowed, he would still have only the mentality of twelve and would be an imbecile. As a matter of fact, there is probably nothing in the whole career and history of Jean Gianini that is inconsistent with a mentality under twelve; and on the other hand there are numbers of things in evidence in connection with his crime that are so thoroughly typical of high-grade imbeciles that any one with experience with this type of person can have no doubt about it; but it is our purpose to show this by an analysis of the case. We must first attempt to remove some of the difficulties in the way of this view.

First, why does it seem absurd to call Jean Gianini an imbecile? Mainly because in the popular mind the term imbecile connotes only the low-grade imbecile, the person who shows in every movement and action, if not in his very face, that he is “lacking,” is “not all there,” is “not quite right,” or whatever may be the expression that we apply to those unfortunate ones, of whom there are, sad to say, always one or more in every community.

Jean Gianini is not of that type; he is a high-grade imbecile; he is of the grade that is only recognized by those who are intimately familiar with imbeciles of all types. He is only discovered when we make a close comparison between him and normal boys of the various ages. We may perhaps liken it to the question of tuberculosis: the average man never recognizes a fellow being as suffering from consumption until he is afflicted with a cough which does not yield to treatment, is constantly expectorating, gets thin and pale, and has other marked outward symptoms; the average person would not find more than one or two consumptives among a hundred persons; the expert physician, however, experienced with tuberculosis, recognizes many more by signs and symptoms which he can describe with great accuracy, and when he is allowed to apply his physiological tests and his clinical thermometer and his microscope, the number increases enormously, and he assures us that every seventh person will die of tuberculosis.

It is hard then for many people to accept the verdict that Jean Gianini is an imbecile, largely because they do not realize what a high-grade imbecile is.

A second reason is found in the fact that we insist upon believing the unbelievable. We view a crime like the one under discussion and say frankly, “It is unbelievable that any reasoning, intelligent person could commit such an atrocious act,” and yet we believe that this boy did; we believe that such a grade of villainy exists and that it can suddenly appear in a boy who never before manifested anything approaching it. The fact is, that our instinctive revulsion against such a thought is the correct view. The fact that Jean Gianini committed such a crime is itself the strongest kind of evidence that he is not a normal boy. But turning from imbecility in the abstract, let us examine concrete instances in the life of Jean Gianini, for we shall find there the best possible illustrations of the characteristics of an imbecile.

We may begin at the most dramatic point—the crime itself. Since we know practically nothing of the crime except through his admissions, we will begin with the confession. And first, why was there a confession? It is safe to say that there is not a sensible man or boy the country over who, knowing the facts in the case, would not say, “What a fool Jean was to confess!” Nobody but an imbecile would have confessed under those circumstances; they had no evidence against him, nor did they pretend they had; he testifies that they told him that they thought he was guilty of the crime; they did not pretend that they knew he was guilty; there were no third-degree methods used; they had taken his clothing off and examined him, but they had not found any blood or any evidence, and the clothing had only just been removed when Jean began to tell his story. He had not been promised any immunity if he should confess; in fact, he had been told that anything that he said would be used against him, but still he persisted in telling the whole story. But we do not have to rely upon the fact that it looks foolish to us for him to have confessed, because we have the fact, well known to all who have to deal with imbeciles, that it is characteristic of them to do just this thing. They do not always confess, it is true. It seems to depend largely upon how proud they are of their deeds—and frequently the more atrocious these are, the prouder they are of them. It is perfectly clear that such was the case with Jean. He made some little attempt to get away, at least he made what appeared like an attempt to get away; there really is no evidence that he was doing anything more than he had done many times before, going away from home to seek work elsewhere, with that wanderlust which is also characteristic of imbeciles. He walked down the railroad track toward Newport, not going very fast, not taking any precautions to avoid being seen, and when met by some one whom he knew, he came willingly back to Poland.

There is the highest probability, perfectly clear to one who understands imbeciles, that almost from the time the deed was done he had a strong desire to tell somebody about it, to brag about it; but a certain instinct, a certain feeling that he ought not to be