=Many Syphilitics Are Married.--=It may seem to some that in a treatise on being well-born the subject of syphilis might be ignored as not being especially pertinent, but the supposition that no considerable percentage of syphilitics marry is not borne out by the facts. Seventy-five per cent. of men with insanity due to syphilis who are admitted to hospitals are married. The insanity in such cases is mainly the result of infections in earlier years, often long before marriage. While syphilis, strictly speaking, is not inherited, that is, does not become part and parcel of the germ-plasm, still the frequency of its direct transmission to offspring is so appalling that the outcome, as far as the immediate child is concerned, is quite as disastrous as the most thoroughgoing real inheritance could be. =Why Permit Conditions to Continue as They Are?--=When one faces the easily ascertained facts regarding venereal disease, it seems incredible that we, an intelligent people, can go on complacently handing our daughters and sisters over to the surgeon's knife and a life of personal misery, and even in not a few instances to become mothers of incurably defective children, yet the dire fact confronts us that we do. We can no longer excuse ourselves on the plea of ignorance, for the grisly record may now be read in many medical and not a few popular treatises, and we find the theme entering even into the modern drama, as witness Brieux's _Damaged Goods_. Further indifference to these conditions can only be attributed to culpable apathy or prudery. The extreme dangers to which parents are subjecting their daughters if they do not demand a clean bill of health on the part of their prospective husbands are obvious. Fathers and mothers perfectly willing to inquire into their future son-in-law's social connections, his income, securities, or business chances become strangely "modest" when it comes to determining whether he is physically fit for marriage. One great cause of ignorance in the past was the prudish taboo against frank discussions of venereal diseases which has thrown the veil of silence about the subject. To-day, however, it is coming to be recognized that these maladies are diseases and not a standard of social propriety, and that like most other diseases the surest way to secure prevention and gradual eradication is through the enlightenment of the public. They are prevalent in all classes of society. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that there is no form of venereal disease which may not be innocently acquired. Even where acquired through transgression of moral law an ignorant attitude toward the sexual instinct is often at the bottom of the difficulty.