726 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION I. 
cheaper than feeding the inmates of the gaols!” Open 
places and parks keep children clean, and off the streets, 
and the education of the industrial school aspirant com- 
mences in the latter. Fevers, or, rather, the dread of them, 
are great levellers, and force all to acknowledge a community 
of interest that otherwise would, and, in fact, did, until 
recently, receive but scant recognition. 
So far, infectiveness, as it promotes cleanliness, has its 
uses. Transgression in defective drainage, dirty habits, 
rotten and unventilated buildings, implies departures from 
health which will not confine themselves to the districts m 
which they start. The sanitation of the slum thus becomes 
the health of the boulevard, and the care of the one is 
necessary to the happiness of the other. No beautiful 
suburban mansion or walled-in garden will keep out fever, 
if the drains of the office that the merchant inhabits are un- 
ventilated, and the caretaker’s family is sickening with 
malignant exanthemata. So, out of our very selfishness, 
we recognise the value of sanitary science. To-day, every 
city, worthy of being distinguished as such, removes its slop- 
waters and excreta in some hygienic manner, instead of 
burying it in a hole right in the midst of us, ag was the 
practice only a few years ago. 
Up to this point. the public are educated, and, thanks to 
the general press, they are commencing to entertain the idea 
that consumption is an eminently infectious disease. But 
this is nearly the limit to which their knowledge in sanita- 
tion extends, and it is only today that this much has been 
acquired. We have still to teach them more. For in- 
stance, they should learn that our Asylums, Incurable Hos- 
pitals, and Benevolent Infirmaries are charged with the con- 
sequence of syphilis, that still stalks rampant in the land; 
that if this disease was controlled, and not dealt with as 
something from which the public should shrink, tabes and 
general paralysis—-two diseases worse than death itself; yes, 
worse than cancer and articular rheumatism—might be 
almost wholly wiped out from amongst us, and be heard of 
only “as a tale that is told.” Late investigations have 
shown that these palsies are entirely preventable, if their 
cause is removed, by the regulation of that class by which 
the disease is spread. 
No doubt, except with a strictly professional audience, 
this is an extremely difficult subject to deal with, but it is 
no less important, and I do hope that some member of this 
Section will be courageous enough to bring forward a paper 
on this matter; for, though the disease, in a measure, is 
diminishing in virulence in its first and second jstages, yet 
