cautions, and likewise we shall never be able to cope with neurasthenia until we remove the conditions which predispose to it. We can no more successfully combat disease by treating its effects only, than can the church combat sin by making no effort to remove its cause. If the church knew as physicians do know the very widespread evils of venereal disease, it would direct its fight as vigorously against houses of prostitution as it does against the saloons. Within a few months past I have been consulted by two mere boys whose mothers I attended when they were born, aged sixteen and seventeen respectively, from whose loins issued the rotten products of syphilitic disease, contracted, as they informed me, at the Fort Wayne Jail Flats (notorious houses of ill fame). How many of their innocent posterity will suffer the effects of their disease, notwithstanding the disappearance of all the original external evidences thereof, it will be difficult to predict. We have a law prohibiting the sale of liquor to minors, but no law prohibiting them from visiting houses of prostitution. It certainly is not inappropriate right here to quote in full the seventh chapter of Proverbs, a chapter, I dare say, from a very mistaken idea of propriety, or by reason of a very spurious modesty, has never constistituted the lesson in any Sunday school: 1. My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee. 2. Keep my commandments and live; and my law as the apple of thine eye. 3. Bind them upon thy fingers, write them down upon the table of thine heart. 4. Say unto wisdom, Thou art my sister; and call understanding thy kinswoman: 5. That they may keep thee from the strange woman, from the stranger which flattereth with her words. 6. For at the window of my house I looked through my casement 7. And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding, 8. Passing through the street near her corner; and he went the way to her house 9. In the twilight in the evening, in the black and dark night; 10. And, behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart. 11. She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house. 12. Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner. 13. So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him: 14. I have peace offerings with me; this day have I paid my vows. 15. Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee. 16. I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt. 19. For the good man is not at home, he is gone a long journey. 20. He hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day appointed. 21. With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him. (This was a reversal of the present usual order of rape.) 22. He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks. 23. Till a dart strike through his liver; (This is probably the first specific symptom) as a bird hasteth to the snare, and knoweth not that it is for his life. 24. Hearken unto me now therefore, O ye children, and attend to the words of my mouth. 25. Let not thine heart decline to her ways, go not astray in her paths. 26. For she hath cast down many wounded; yea, many strong men have been slain by her. (Yes, that is true, and "pity it is 'tis true.' The number she hath cast down wounded and the number of otherwise good, strong men slain by her is appalling. It certainly exceeds by far the number killed by any other disease, by war, pestilence and famine, from the time of Job, who evidently had the disease, down to the present. Indeed, it is a question whether there is a man, woman or child now living who is not tainted with syphilis, by whatever more respectable name it may be called-scrofula, or what not-and it has long been a question in my own mind whether that dread disease consumption is not in some way connected with, related to, or the result of syphilitic disease.) 27. Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of death. (Yea, verily! Her house is the way to hell, as all physicians of any experience can readily testify, for they are in a position to know, to see and realize the damnable effects of this most damnable disease, syphilis. Notwithstanding this solemn truth so generally known, these houses of ill fame are allowed to exist and carry on their rotten business, subject to an occasional fine or assessment at police courts.) The following I clip from a recent issue of the Journal-Gazette of this city: 66 SEVENTY-SIX WOMEN ARE FINED IN COURT. BAWDY-HOUSE ASSESSMENTS YESTERDAY AMOUNTED TO $1,320. "Seventy-six women, keepers and inmates of immoral resorts in the city, were assessed fines and costs in the police court yesterday aggregating $1,320. Eighteen keepers of resorts were fined $10 and costs each, amounting to $20 each, and fifty-eight inmates were fined $5 and costs each, amounting to $15 each. Out of the $1,230 collected, the city receives $380. Now, think of that, O civilized America! The city gets $380 for permission to spread syphilis, gonorrhea, and all manner of filth and corruption, physical and moral, among her youth! When women learn that these diseases are very frequently the primary causes that make absolutely necessary operations for the removal of their ovaries, tubes and wombs, they will discover that in all probability their own husbands have been visiting these bawdy houses, and their interest in their utter destruction will no doubt increase. The splendid city of Fort Wayne receiving "tainted tainted money" under the guise of fines! Think of it! Think! A city that is very careful about the spread of smallpox, but wholly indifferent about the spread of large pox-indeed, selling it to her youth at so much per fine or assessment. O consistency, thou art two jewels— twenty-four carat jewels! What is our Board of Health doing, anyhow? I would like to ask it which is the most serious disease, smallpox or large pox? If the latter, what is it doing to stamp it out? Why is it not as necessary to place a card marked "syphilis" or 'large pox" on the Fort Wayne Jail Flats as it is to post a card marked smallpox or diphtheria on any other house? It is daily becoming a more and more serious question how a pure, virtuous young lady is to know whether the man she marries is as clean and pure as she is herself. The church is not exerting the influence it should exert in the way of preventing the evils of the present day resulting from the strenuous life lived by all classes. We need a "scheme of redemption" that will redeem-redeem from the effects of these evils, from hunger and cold, war and famine, and from injustice. The masses are expecting the church to speak on every qttestion---prostitution as well as intemperance, the inequality of opportunity among the masses, the slavery of the masses to the money-power, child labor, trusts, syndicates, government ownership of railroads, telegraph lines, and all great public util!ties, on every question affecting the commonwealth and the common people. But we are told it is not the mission of the church to teach politics. I reply it is the mission of the church to teach everything that is good and true. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days. "Behold, the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth. "Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth and been wanton. Ye have condemned and killed the just, and he doth not resist you. Righteousness exalteth a nation but sin is a reproach to any people. When the righteous are in authority, the people rejoice; but when the wicked beareth rule, the people If it is not the mission of the church to teach politics, I fear it will have very little to do in the not far distant future, for the oldtime theological arena in which the faiths of the different sects were taught, discussed frequently in a malicious rather than in a Christian spirit, this old-time theological arena in which doctrine, dogma and creed were constantly discussed, has ceased to attract the attention of the masses, who are beginning to feel that some regard should be had for their present temporal and physical interests as well as for their future spiritual welfare, the former, indeed, being more calculated to secure the latter. The latter, however, is now known by the masses to be an unsettled question. Faith is not knowledge, and is ever and anon inclined to entertain doubt. The church has never furnished the world with any present-day positive proof of a future existence, and its pulpit and pew of to-day contain many materialists, agnostics and skeptics on the question of a future life. And so the masses do not feel disposed to be cheated out of a fair enjoyment of the life that now is by having their attention continually directed to one in the future about which the church knows nothing. If ever a future existence be established as a scientific fact, it will not be by and through the efforts of the church, but by such societies as the Society for Psychical Research, in Europe and America, whose work in recent years promises to add to the faith of the church the knowledge of science of a life beyond death. It is a mysterious, unexplainable fact, however, that along this line of psychical research science is receiving no aid, assistance or sympathy from the church, which is dying for the want of some tangible, satisfactory evidence of the soul's continued existence after leaving its mortal or physical environment. I recently read a letter from one Methodist preacher to another in which the writer confesses to being skeptical about a future life. It is surely about time the church was getting some evidence thereof. Whatever relates to human well-being beneath any form of government is worthy of being discussed at any time and place. If it be the duty and mission of the church to save souls, the more comfortable the bodies are rendered which those souls temporarily inhabit, the more likely will it be to succeed in its mission. "No man careth for my soul" is usually quoted by the evangelist in the beginning of a revival in his pathetic appeals to church members to interest themselves in the salvation of the lost. But the cry of the average laboring man of today is that no man careth for my body. He knows that no man can care for his soul that has not a corresponding care for his body, and its temporal well-being. He never sees the familiar prayer, "God Bless Our Home," in frame and hung upon the wall of the family residence, that he is not reminded of another prayer not any more exclusive if more selfishly expressed: "God bless me and my wife, Us four and no more, Amen!" There are too many theological standards for an age that takes very little, if any, pleasure in theology, and there is too much sectarianism at a time when men are inclined or would rather believe more firmly in brotherly love. The tendency is toward a minimum of creed and a maximum of charity. Men are having more faith in an honest life than in any creed, and would feel safer at the judgment bar of God with an honorable business record behind them than with all the theological decisions of the Council of Nice. Corruption should find in the pulpit its unrelenting enemy and official honor its mightiest defence, whatever the amount of "tainted money" within reach. If politics make for happiness or woe; if they affect man's life, the church that stands for "God and humanity' will have to speak, to teach, and that with no uncertain sound. It may succeed in converting a man rotten with syphilis, but his conversion does not remove his disease or prevent the future effects of it; it may render him spiritually clean, but it utterly fails, physically, to wash him "whiter than snow. The stand for right must be made where human suffering and ignorance and vice prevail. Theological doctrine is well enough in its place, but it has been debated and discussed and argued and harped on so long that it has become tiresome to the masses, whose interest in the church is not now very intense. Passion and appetite, our fellowmen, greed, graft, bribery, corruption, dishonesty, bad laws and the failure to execute good ones, wicked customs, the Golden Rule, equal rights to all and special privileges to none, live and let live, the evil effects of life made strenuous by the few who have become possessed of millions at the expense of the many--these are the questions that ought to be discussed in the pulpit as well as upon the rostrum, but are not because the money-power controls the pulpit as it does our legislatures and all else worth controlling in the Nation. "If ye fulfill the royal law according to the Scriptures, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." If the church had made this idea the burden of its work and energy instead of discussing for centuries past theological doctrines and denominational differences, there would be no occasion to present to you at this time a paper on the strenuous life of the day. And now, what shall we say upon the second subject of my paper, or Race Suicide?" I have consumed so much time upon the first, or strenuous life," that whatever I say upon the second must be said briefly. Indeed, it does not seem necessary to say anything at all, inasmuch as all that might be said upon the second subject will naturally suggest itself to you by what has been said upon the first, so intimately connected are they. With suicide in the abstract we are not now concerned. We may note in passing, however, that the prevalent idea that suicide is never committed by a sane mind is now called in question. To be or not to be is the question often debated in the minds of the perfectly sane, who decide in the negative rather than bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," or continue the daily grind and monotony of the struggle for existence. When so many bright and intelligent men and women come to look upon life as a humiliating if not a cruel practical joke, 66 there must be something radically wrong with it or the conditions under which it is lived. Our opinion is that it is the strenuosity of those conditions which renders life not worth its living to so many of our fellow-men. Demosthenes, Themistocles, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Hannibal, Samsom and Samsom and Judas Iscariot ended their days by suicide, although there is some doubt about the latternamed individual's final dissolution. In one Biblical account it is written that he fell headlong, burst asunder in his midst, and all his bowels gushed out, and in another we are informed that he hanged himself. He could hardly have done both, for it would be difficult even to imagine him running around with twenty-six feet of intestines dragging on the ground or held in one arm while with the other he adjusted a rope to the nearest limb and performed the hanging act secundem artem. Many persons of note have defended the crime of suicide, as Madam de Stael, Gibbon, Hume, Schopenhauer, von Hartman and Robert G. Ingersoll. There can be no question that the newspapers are innocently and indirectly responsible for many suicides by publishing instances of their occurrence among persons of influence among their friends. Every suicide, published or unpublished, is a suggestion to all who read or hear of it to go and do likewise if any cause, however small or trivial, real or imaginary, exists. Suicide, like smallpox, is contagious, although, fortunately, not to the same degree, and often becomes more or less epidemic or endemic. The recent suicide of the noted baseball player, Mr. Charles Stahl, was followed immediately by the suicides of three of his intimate friends, one of whom left a note requesting that he be buried beside his friend Mr. Stahl. But our second subject is that of "Race Suicide," which means something different from suicide of the individual. The term race suicide," it seems, is not original with President Roosevelt. Mr. E. A. Ross, Professor of Sociology in the University of Wisconsin, claims to be the author of it, having first used it in an address at Philadelphia in 1901. It makes no special difference, however, who the author of the term is. We are more concerned in what it implies. Professor Ross informs us that President Roosevelt, in his original statement on this question, did not so much advocate large families as to deplore the tendency of the rich to avoid family duties altogether. "What we want," says Professor Ross, is more children from rising elements of our population and fewer from those who cannot rise. The tendency now is to the contrary. There will be fewer children from those who are climbing and more from the unambitious ones. The cause of the restriction of the number of children is not so much because possible parents cannot provide for them, but because of the rapidly rising standards of living. It is a better table, more upholstery, and fewer children. It is bric-a-brac versus babies. It is not a question of support, but a selfish motive to enjoy more of the good things of life. It is the intelligent side as opposed to the instinctive. I believe in a family of from four to six children, and would make that the standardized number. Any more is an imposition on the mother." Now, from what I have said upon the subject of the 'strenuous life," it will be observed that Professor Ross is not in entire accord with myself or that I am not with him. I have maintained that it is a question of support, while he asserts that it is not. He asserts that "the cause of the restriction of the number of children is not so much because possible parents cannot provide for them, but because of the rapidly rising standards of living," which it appears to me is a distinction without a difference, for it enters as an element or factor into the principal or main reason I have advanced, that of the inability to support or to provide for them. I maintain that it is because possible parents cannot provide for them according to the "rising standards of living" that the number of children is restricted, and that the reason he gives "the rapidly rising standards of living" -is but a part of my general proposition of the inability of possible parents supporting their children. As physicians we hear a variety of reasons for the disgustingly numerous requests we get to interrupt pregnancy from the young wife or her husband, or both, and the reason most frequently given, and often after other reasons had failed to persuade the physician that he was justifiable in granting the request, supposing it to be a clincher and necessarily unanswerable, is the reason that they are absolutely unable financially to raise a family, not even a single child, and it was for the same reason that they hesitated long in getting married, but did so hoping that they could. prevent offspring until they were in more comfortable circumstances. They also entertained the very prevalent but very erroneous idea that it is very easy and a very simple matter for the physician to produce an abortion, and that there is no moral wrong connected with it if done early. If they knew as we know the evil results of abortion, no matter when performed, they would think differently. It is seldom that the request for the production of an abortion comes from the wife primarily, for the maternal instinct is strong and deep-rooted in feminine character. And how early and beautifully it is developed! What grander picture for the artist or sculptor than the little girl, herself a mere babe, rocking to sleep her doll, or pushing it along in her little buggy on the sidewalk! But the young wife makes the request because it is the desire of the husband, in whom it is prompted by his dread of bringing into the strenuous life of the present, into this cold, selfish world, children whose experiences with it may possibly―aye, probably be as unpleasant as his own have been, if not more so. But, however strong the maternal instinct may be, it should not be gratified to the extent of filling up our asylums, reformatories and prisons with the idiotic, insane, feeble-minded and degenerate, when and where the proper check can be placed upon it. Such women and men, in my opinion, should be rendered incapable of procreation. We are frequently asked by the intelligent laity who visit these idiots, imbeciles and lowgrade incurables in our institutions for them, what harm would there be in going among them with a bucketful of chloroform and Oslerizing them secundem artem? I have answered that there is a commandment in our decalogue which says "Thou shalt not kill." But, says the layman, when a horse or a dog is in misery beyond remedy it is customary to exhibit our mercy and sympathy for the poor brute by shooting him. When in war, we go into battle with the intention of killing our fellow-men and at the risk of being killed. Does the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," apply only in times of peace? If so, it should have been so qualified. But the consideration of this phase of the subject more properly belongs to the church, which knows all about the religious wars of the past, than to the physician or layman. I may add, however, that if Ella Wheeler Wilcox is authorized to speak for her sex, it has rebelled against raising any more sons to be shot down in war. From one of her recent poems I take the following stanza: "Since Christ his new commandment gave to men, Rather than breed strong sons, at war's behest, The rapid increase in numbers of the lowest possible grades of humanity is a very serious question, and if there is any way to prevent it, it should be adopted. Race suicide, or suicide of this race of humanity, would be a blessing rather than a curse, and should be encouraged in every possible manner. I would have very little, if any, hesitancy in aborting a pregnancy promising such fruit. A few years ago a young lady, sixteen years of age and the very picture of health, was brought to me by her aunt, with whom she was living, her mother being dead. She was brought to me because of the fact that she had ceased to menstruate, having missed two periods. periods. After prescribing for her several times without avail I made a thorough examination, and discovered that she was pregnant. Upon informing her aunt of my diagnosis she at once became very angry, insulted, and indignantly repudiated it, reflecting as it did upon the character of the care and attention she was giving her niece. The more she thought of my diagnosis the less she thought of it and the more anger she manifested, knowing that her niece had kept company with no young man and no young men had been calling on her, all of which was absolutely true, as the sequel will show. Time passed on, however, and the girl's condition developed to the stage of ready recognition, when she acknowledged all, revealing the astounding fact that the father of her unborn child was none other than her own brother, six or seven years her senior. After recovering from the shock occasioned by this startling announcement, I advised an abortion, but was unwilling to assume the responsibility of it myself. She was taken to a neighboring city, where she, fortunately, fell into the hands of an old, conscientious physician, one of the "back numbers," who presented her case to his medical society. A committee of physicians was appointed to examine it, and it finally unanimously agreed that an abortion should be performed, which was accordingly so done. How many products of such conceptions are contained in our various asylums is an interesting question from a scientific viewpoint, but one difficult to solve. The human race should by every consideration receive as much care and attention on the subject of breeding as do the more important |