the diffusion of the bacillus rather than by attacking the disease itself. The prairie-fire spread of cholera, once attributed to wind-borne infection, is now seen to be always along the lines of human movement. The vast pilgrim throngings at Hardwar and Allahabad in India used to be regularly followed by cholera outbreaks. The chief means of prevention is strict cleanliness along with the extermination of flies. Although occasionally nowadays a case appears in an Occidental seaport, prompt isolation of the patient prevents further trouble.

Typhus. This disease preys upon men living closely together in uncleanness and hence its aliases, "jail fever," "ship fever," "camp fever." It was the terror of the Napoleonic campaigns and the scourge of the armies in the Crimea. During the World War more than a million cases occurred among the Allied troops, mainly on the Eastern fronts. In 1908 it was shown by the French bacteriologist Nicolle that the germ of typhus is conveyed by vermin. During the World War the United States Public Health Service sifted the matter and concluded that the body-louse is the sole carrier. The brilliant success of American sanitarians in checking typhus in the Balkans, the Near East, Russia and Siberia was due to their anti-louse tactics. Thanks to such measures the American Expeditionary Force was virtually free from typhus. In 1923 only two deaths from typhus were reported in the United States. There is no reason why the disease should ever bother civilized countries again in time of peace. In Soviet Russia during the civil war and

invasions, typhus gained such momentum that the death-rate exceeded the birth-rate and Lenin said, "The question hangs in the balance whether the louse will conquer socialism, or socialism the louse." Having got the general death-rate of Moscow down to 13.7 Dr. Semashko, Commissioner of Public Health of Soviet Russia, exultantly declares, “Socialism has now conquered the louse."

Yellow fever. A scourge of the tropical New World, introduced perhaps in slave-ships from the West Coast of Africa, yellow fever has found a foothold in the United States about ninety times. In 1793 it slew a tenth of the people in Philadelphia, while in 1853 it carried away 8,000 in New Orleans. The lassoing of this monster dates from 1899, when the disease was discovered to be conveyed only by the bite of the female stegomyia mosquito. The story of the expulsion of yellow fever first from Cuba and the Canal Zone, then from the Caribbean, finally even from the Western Hemisphere, is the best-known romance in the history of medicine. It is now being pursued to its last fortress, West Africa.

The bubonic plague. This "black death" figures in the ancient Sanskrit and Egyptian writings and in the Bible. Forty-one epidemics of the plague are recorded as having occurred before the Christian era. During the first fifteen centuries. of this era there are records of 109 epidemics of it. In the middle of the fourteenth century it wiped out at least a quarter of the people of Europe. Within a period of fourteen months it killed half the people of England and never left the island until 1679. until 1679. Since the seventeenth

century Western Europe has been virtually free from it and in the nineteenth century it ravaged in ravaged in Europe only Turkey and South Russia.

The plague haunts the crowded East and in 1923 there were nearly 400,000 deaths from plague, nine tenths of them in India. Although there is a standardized serum, our growing defiance of the disease springs from the discovery that it is communicated by the bite of a flea which infests rodents. No rodents, no plague. So with rat-poison, concrete construction and squirrel guns it is now possible to hold the pest at arm's length.

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In the words of Dr. Vincent, President of the Rockefeller Foundation: "The presence of smallpox is now a disgrace to any civilized community or country; cholera and plague have disappeared from the leading nations; typhoid fever has been enormously reduced; malaria and hookworm disease are giving ground; yellow fever is being narrowly restricted; typhus is practically unknown among cleanly people; the fear of diphtheria has been largely allayed. Such victories as these, together with advances in general sanitation, higher living standards, and more attention to individual health habits, have resulted in steadily falling deathrates in all the more progressive countries."

In 1890 the average death-rate in the cities of the Registration Area of the United States was 22.1 per thousand; the rural rate, 15.3. Now the city rate is actually below the rural rate. Seventy-five years ago the death-rate of New York City

was 50 per thousand, now it is 12.2. For Massachusetts the expectation of life has risen as follows: 185539.77 years; 1890—43.48 years; 1895 -45-35 years; 1901-47.75 years; 1910-51.19 years; and 1920-55.25 years. On both sides of the Atlantic children born now may expect to live two decades longer than their grandfathers. In 1901 a baby born in our Registration Area might hope to last fifty years. Our expectation of life is now about sixty years. No doubt five years more could be added were the American people willing to lay out $2.50 per capita on well-directed public-health efforts instead of a paltry fifty cents. For a generation Australia has on the average added each year a third of a year to the term of life. In New Zealand the life span has reached sixty-two years. The Scandinavians are a little ahead of us, while the English are right on our heels with a life expectation of about fifty-five years. Before the war France, Germany, Italy and Japan had life spans of from forty-five to fortyeight years. Before the close of this century some peoples may achieve the normal life, the Biblical "three score and ten."

Until lately the life of the race, as heedless as the car of Juggernaut, has moved forward over the corpses of babies. In the latter part of the eighteenth century half the infants born in London died under two years. Our grandparents, if they were citydwellers, lost one child in four before it was a year old. Before the World War a quarter of the babies born in Hungary and Russia failed to live a year. Two decades ago Moscow was losing forty-eight ba

bies out of a hundred. In Chile in 1913 I found even the reported loss to be one third (now a fourth), but in some of the larger cities 47 per cent faded away. As for the Orient, the futility of its blind spawning is horrifying. Manila, 1903-11, showed an infant mortality rate of 552 per thousand. In Bombay in 1921, 55 per cent of the infants failed to live out a year and there are factory cities in British India which lose three fifths.

Opposed to this, where the lessons of modern hygiene and medicine have been taken to heart, infants flourish as if led by guardian angels. Among us in the last quarter of a century roughly speaking, whoopingcough has been cut to a half, scarlet fever to a quarter, measles to a fifth and diphtheria to a fifth. There are now thirteen peoples that get more than nine tenths of their babies through the first year. In England and in London the infant loss is one in fourteen, which is about the figure for the United States. In thirty years Australia has cut its infant mortality nearly one half. It is New Zealand, however, that holds the world's record for good mothering, since she loses in the first year but one baby in twenty-five! Back through all human experience, spanning, say, half a million years, the equal of this has never been known. Product of brains, heart and teamwork, it is as much entitled to rank among the "wonders of the world" as the Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or the Panama Canal.

In view of all these miraculous rescues and deliverances how can we

justify ourselves in producing children at the old rate? Shall we keep on bringing infants into the world just as if they still had to run the gauntlet of the fell swordsmen of Azrael? To breed as of old, now that the mortality among the enlightened peoples has been halved in a lifetime, would result in a rapidity of growth such as has occurred hitherto only for brief periods in the first settling of the choicest regions by select immigrants. We hear much of "race suicide" but generally the death-rate has fallen faster than the birth-rate, so that most of the enlightened are increasing faster than ever.

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Harken to a parable.

A passenger steamer is navigating a great river, touching at every landing. At some wharves more leave than get on, at other wharves more embark than get off; but, on the whole, the number of passengers does not exceed the number that can comfortably be provided with berths and meals. But how if most of the passengers prolong their journey, tarry longer on the boat? How if at each landing only about half as many leave as get on? Why, soon either people must be thrust off the boat, or else fewer may be allowed to embark. Other alternative there is none. How childish are those who think to evade the spear points of this logic by showing how many more might be carried if people were allowed to sleep on the floor of the engine-room or on the roof of the pilot-house, by pointing out that saloon, music and smoking-rooms might be filled with bunks!

T

HOSE insiders who have more intimate opportunities than I to examine our American life at first hand, assure me that the present deplorable matrimonial condition in which we find ourselves, is due to the revolt of the male. This view may be wrong. I am not here indorsing it. But it is held extensively and is very interesting and significant. Many doctors and clergymen hold it privately, although their public utterances are doubtless tempered by a tactful discretion.

One doctor I have known for years, who until recently has had a large family practice, told me that within a radius of a few residential squares from where we sat, he could name five young couples in which the husbands, who in two or three cases were fathers, had deliberately deserted their wives-"walked out on them," as he bluntly expressed it. He added that these five cases were only in one group of his patients. He knew of many others.

My friends tell me the revolt of the male is the result of the breaking loose of so many women from domestic drudgery, of their coyness toward housekeeping in general. They seek new thrills. As one married woman of forty-a college graduate whose married life was a wreck-put it:

"I seek for something beyond what my husband can give me; my married life has not compensated my craving for better things." What these were she did not define. Her husband "walked out" on her suddenly, without previous friction however. As for him, he was heard to say, quite simply and casually, that she didn't keep her end up. That settled it. How offhand these young men seem; but beneath it all, who knows what they are really thinking about?

Added to these and to the other causes they mention to show the deep psychological unrest of the American male animal, domesticus, my friends the first hand observers quote Latin: "Furor fit læsa sæpius patientia." Or, as Dryden had it: "Beware the fury of a patient man."

Another sage said: "The young fellows who walk out on their wives to-day feel a deep sense of injustice. They have been wronged."

Family love was an old Roman bulwark, wrought out in discipline. It carried Rome far. The common love feast, agape, from which the Christian church came, means sacrifice, the merging of the personal desires in the good for others. "Our language," remarks Dean Inge, "has no separate words to distinguish

Christian Love from sexual Love; 'charity' has not established itself in its wider meaning."

True, but how can we be expected to practise Love, if we have forgotten what it means?

And yet the word Love seems easy enough to grasp in meaning. Its qualities appear distinct and simple. It has three incontestable parts. First, it must have an object. Second, it never considers, or is always willing to sacrifice, itself. Third, it is constructive. It does not destroy, it builds. It is always creative. The nuptial flight of insects is too often death to the enraptured mother. Robins, feeding their young, take no thought for themselves. Instinct alternately constructs and sacrifices. From time immemorial countless women have sacrificed themselves for their young. Economic pressure, even in such a prosperous country as America, is conspicuous. Yet in spite of its simplicity, the widespread ignorance of what Love is, bears its fruit in our divorce courts. In its simplest aspects, it is much easier to define it than to practise it, just as talk is easier than action. In its blending of the psychical and sensual, in the case of genius Shelley, Liszt, Poe and so many others-it is quite beyond analysis. Here the illuminated human being is at war with society, with man-made conventions. Yet, sweeping aside the illusory phenomena of life, we know, we feel, that real Love is merely self-forgetfulness; and this requires self-discipline. Robert Louis Stevenson, who certainly experienced in his own life the cross currents of passion and mysticism, has written: "Falling in love and winning love are

often difficult tasks, but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which both man and wife must bring both kindness and goodwill." Love without due restraint and surrender is counterfeit.

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There is always this cryptic line of demarcation between sacred and profane love. Do not take my word for it. It is not essential to read up on sex as such. Read "The Song of Solomon" and the mystical interpretation of it, as given by Dean Inge in his "Christian Mysticism.' In Greek mythology learn the difference between Eros and Aphrodite. Read Plato, Christ: read in Beveridge's "Life of John Marshall" how one of our own great men cared for his invalid wife, and how long Thomas Huxley waited for his true Love. You may be certain that Real Romance, the thing which every one secretly craves, is not made in cafeterias, road-houses or sedan cars. It is a home brew. The most romantic couple I know have just celebrated their fiftieth anniversary. They are not poring over the confessional magazines. As for the properties of right Love, the thirteenth chapter of the first Corinthians is perhaps the best description. In modern times Henry Drummond's "Greatest Thing in the World" is a classic expression. There are countless others. Indeed the literature of Love has not been transgressed.

Both in its simplicity and its complexity, it confuses us. The real difficulty lies in our lack of understanding of it in its spiritual and sensual aspects. It is true that in ideal married life these aspects blend. They should blend. They should blend. They are like