ermination of the very source itself. A well-known authority states
the one breeding-place of these disease germs, without exception, is the
social institution designated as prostitution, but, once bred and
cultivated there, they then spread through the community, attacking
alike both the innocent and the guilty.

We can imagine, after a dozen years of vigorous and able propaganda of
this opinion on the part of public-spirited physicians and sanitarians,
that a city might well appeal to the medical profession to exterminate
prostitution on the very ground that it is a source of constant danger
to the health and future of the community. Such a city might readily
give to the board of health ordered to undertake this extermination more
absolute authority than is now accorded to it in a small-pox epidemic.
Of course, no city could reach such a view unless the education of the
public proceeded much more rapidly than at present, although the
newly-established custom of careful medical examination of
school-children and of employees in factories and commercial
establishments must result in the discovery of many such cases, and in
the end adequate provision must be made for their isolation. A child was
recently discovered in a Chicago school with an open sore upon her lip,
which made her a most dangerous source of infection. She was just
fourteen years of age, too old to be admitted into that most pathetic
and most unlovely of all children's wards, where children must suffer
for "the sins of their fathers," and too young and innocent to be put
into the women's ward in which the public takes care of those wrecks of
dissolute living who are no longer valuable to the commerce which once
secured them, and have become merely worthless stock which pays no
dividend. The disease of the little girl was in too virulent a stage to
admit her to that convalescent home lately established in Chicago for
those infected children who are dismissed from the county hospital, but
whom it is impossible to return to their old surroundings. A
philanthropic association was finally obliged to pay her board for weeks
to a woman who carefully followed instructions as to her treatment. This
is but one example of a child who was discovered and provided for, but
it is evident that the public cannot long remain indifferent to the care
of such cases when it has already established the means for detecting
them. In twenty-seven months over six hundred children pa