It is impossible to exaggerate the stigma of shame incurred by the intelligent, adult proportion of the population in deliberately and scientifically preparing for the massacre and maiming of the youthful, ignorant and heedless members of the community. One city, for instance, added twenty-six surgeons to its ambulance corps, while another engaged twelve distributors of tetanus antitoxin, had field dressing stations prepared by its National Volunteer Emergency Service and sent around fifteen hundred vials of antitoxin serum to its hospitals. And thus many cities anticipated the return of their Day of Carnage, preparing to bind wounds and lacking the courage required to insist on the passage of drastic prohibitive ordinances which would have rendered impossible the shedding of blood. I am sure that the thanks of all are due to one of our medical publications which, for years past, has compiled statistics upon statistics, based upon the price that we pay for our present-day mad celebration of the Fourth, for without the splendid work of the _Journal of the American Medical Association_ we should be unable to estimate the cost of our annual holiday. As for the figures, so laboriously compiled, they are simply amazing. To think of fifteen hundred and thirty-one deaths and thirty-three thousand and seventy-three accidents, the fearful sacrifice voluntarily offered by us, within the last seven years, to our false ideals! And yet these tables, shocking as they are, give so inadequate an idea of the suffering involved! For of these fifteen hundred and thirty-one deaths, practically none came painlessly, almost all being accompanied by the convulsions of tetanus, the torments of fire, or the shock of injuries which changed healthy, happy children into shapeless, agonizing horrors. While as for the thirty-three thousand and seventy-three who were injured, but not fatally, how many are dragging out their wretched lives, blind, maimed or crippled!