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 passed through this most piteous children’s ward in Chicago’s public hospital.  All but twenty-nine of these children were under ten years of age, and doubtless a number of them had been victims of that wretched tradition that a man afflicted with this incurable disease might cure himself at the expense of innocence.

Crusades against other infectious diseases, such as small-pox and cholera, imply well-considered sanitary precautions, dependent upon widespread education and an aroused public opinion.  To establish such education and to arouse the public in regard to this present menace apparently presents insuperable difficulties.  Many newspapers, so ready to deal with all other forms of vice and misery, never allow these evils to be mentioned in their columns except in the advertisements of quack remedies; the clergy, unlike the founder of the Christian religion and the early apostles, seldom preach against the sin of which these contagions are an inevitable consequence:  the physicians, bound by a rigorous medical etiquette, tell nothing of the prevalence of these maladies, use a confusing nomenclature in the hospitals, and write only contributory causes upon the very death certificates of the victims.