seductive, often masquerade as respectability, or constitute the perfumed, the romantic, the elegant carriers of disease.  The proportion of ignorant to wilful irresponsibility can scarcely be estimated.  But there is little choice between the two except on the score of the hopefulness of the latter.  As examples of the mixture of types with which a large hospital is constantly dealing, I might offer the following at random, from my own recollections:  A milkman came to a clinic one morning with an eruption all over his body and his mouth full of the most dangerously contagious patches.  Two of us cornered him and explained to him in full why he should come in if only for twenty-four hours.  He promised to be back next morning and disappeared.  Another, a butcher in the same condition, put his wife, whom he had already infected, into the hospital, and in spite of every argument by all the members of the staff, went home to attend to his business—­the selling of meat over the counter.  A lunch-room helper, literally oozing germs, was after several days induced to come up for an examination and promised to begin treatment, whereupon he disappeared.  A college student reported with an early primary sore.  “X——­,” I said, “If you will pledge me your honor as a gentleman never to take another chance and not to marry until I say you are cured I will use salvarsan on you, which is just about as scarce as gold now, and give you a chance for abortive cure.”  He pledged himself, and six months later there was every sign that we were going to secure a perfect result.  Suddenly he failed to appear for a treatment appointment, and I never saw him again.  But I did see a letter written to him by the clinic which showed that he had come up for the examination with a newly acquired sore while he knew I was away—­in all probability a reinfection.  He was not even man enough to face me with his broken word.  Three or four men with chancres may report in an afternoon and leave, the clinic powerless to detain them or to protect others against the damage they may do.  One such, a Greek boy, had exposed four different women to infection before we saw him, and only the most strenuous efforts of the entire staff got him into the hospital, because he had neither money nor sense.  Half-witted tramps, gang laborers, and foreigners who cannot understand a word of any other language than Lithuanian or some other of the European dialects for which no interpreter can be secured, pass in a steady stream through the free clinics of large cities.  The impossibility of securing even the simplest cooeperation from such patients is scarcely realized by any one who is not called upon to deal with them face to face.  Even with an interpreter, they display the wilfulness of irresponsibility.  One Italian woman wiped her chancre, which was on her lip, with her fingers at every other shake of the head.  She was cooking for two boarders and had two children.  She did not like hospitals and was homesick and pettish.