THE yUKES, 3t 



and injuries, in their relations to pauperism. In this table children 

 who have died of inherited diseases and were buried by the town, 

 are excluded because they have no significance as causes of pauper- 

 ism, their early death placing them in the category of effects of dis- 

 ease and pauperism ; nor is any person counted under two headings. 



Notice here, while the percentage of pauperism for the whole 

 family is only 22.22 per cent, that of pauperism among the sick and 

 disabled is 56.47 per cent. In one case, the hereditary blindness 

 of one man cost the town twenty-three years of out-door relief for 

 two people and a town burial. Another case of hereditary blindness 

 cost eight years of out-door and three years of poor-house relief, 

 with a town burial. 



But the disease which the above tabk shows as the most com- 

 mon, as incontestably it is the most destructive, subtle and difficult 

 to eradicate, is syphilis. One cause of its great prevalence is that 

 many men deliberately expose themselves to it, because it is ac- 

 counted a matter of manly prowess to be proof against infection. 

 Their ignorance is such that they count syphilization as indicative 

 of virility. In this exhibit are enumerated only the cases properly 

 vouched for by competent physicians or directly drawn from the 

 records of the poor-house, and six so notorious as to be trustworthy. 

 Here, the proportion of those blighted by it reaches 10.86 per cent, 

 but this does not include half of the victims of this class of dis- 

 orders. On the authority of physicians who know, from twenty- 

 five to thirty per cent are tainted with it. Significant as are these 

 aggregate figures, they are weak as compared to the lesson which 

 is pointed when we analyze the lines along which this disease runs, 

 and note its devastation of individual careers and its pauperizing 

 influence on successive generations. If it were merely the record 

 of so many human beings who have simply died, it would lose most 

 of its significance ; but in view that this is the record of so many 

 who have lived maimed lives, maimed in numberless ways ; entail- 

 ing maimed lives full of weakness, which is wretchedness ; sapping 

 the vitality of innocent ones to the third and fourth generations 

 in a constantly broadening stream, and breeding complex social dis- 

 orders growing out of these physiological degenerations, the question 



