A third, and even more fundamental, advantage of a State Medical Service is that it would help to bring Treatment into touch with Prevention. The private practitioner, as such, inside or outside the Insurance scheme, cannot conveniently go behind his patient's illness. But the State doctor would be entitled to ask: _Why_ has this man broken down? The State's guardianship of the health of its citizens now begins at birth (is tending to be carried back before birth) and covers the school life. If a man falls ill, it is, nowadays, legitimate to inquire where the responsibility lies. It is all very well to patch up the diseased man with drugs or what not. But at best that is a makeshift method. The Consumptive Sanatoriums have aroused enthusiasm, and they also are all very well. But the Charity Organisation Society has shown that only about 50 per cent. of those who pass through such institutions become fit for work. It is not more treatment of disease that we want, it is less need for treatment. And a State Medical Service is the only method by which Medicine can be brought into close touch with Hygiene. The present attitude of the medical profession sometimes strikes people as narrow, unpatriotic, and merely self-interested. But the Insurance Act has brought a powerful ferment of intellectual activity into the medical profession which in the end will work to finer issues. A significant sign of the times is the establishment of the State Medical Service Association, having for its aim the organisation of the medical profession as a State Service, the nationalisation of hospitals, and the unification of preventive and curative medicine. To many in the medical profession such schemes still seem "Utopian"; they are blind to a process which has been in ever increasing action for more than half a century and which they are themselves taking part in every day. [1] The result sometimes is that the ambitious doctor seeks to become a specialist in at least one subject, and instals a single expensive method of treatment to which he enthusiastically subjects all his patients. This would be comic if it were not sometimes rather tragic. XIII EUGENICS AND GENIUS