But venereal diseases are still here among us. If prostitution could be expelled from our earth, the generations following such a happy catastrophe would be free of venereal diseases. But as humanity seems to be now constituted, we shall have to wait a long time for the spontaneous disappearance of this plague. Even in the ideal state of society, dreamt of by our economic determinists, prostitution will still be in existence, as long as we continue to breed mental defects. Only a very small percentage of prostitution is due to economic conditions. In the great majority of cases it is absence of every moral principle and will-power which determine the girls to embrace this unhappy profession. Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky (Etudes anthropométriques sur les voleuses et prostituées) found that professional prostitutes are imperfect beings, affected by arrest of development, generally due to morbid heredity, and present mental and physical signs of degeneracy in accord with their imperfect evolution. They accept their abject trade agreeably and do not want to change it. Laziness and absence of moral sense are the principal traits characteristic of the prostitute. Dr. Olga Bridgman (Jour. Amer. Med. Assoc., August 16, 1913) found among a hundred and four sexually immoral girls, examined at admission at the State training school for girls at Geneva, one hundred and one or ninety-seven per cent. feeble-minded and only three normal. Dr. Edith E. Spaulding, Physician, Massachusetts Reformatory for Women, Sherborn, Mass. (The Amer. Social Hygiene Assoc. Bulletin, May, 1914), has completed a study of the mental and physical factors in the cases of 244 girls leading a life of prostitution. Of these over ninety-nine per cent. had one of the venereal diseases, fifty per cent. had both syphilis and gonorrhoea. Of the total number 60 per cent. showed syphilis and 89 per cent. gonorrhoea. The mental and environmental factors disclosed by this investigation are no less valuable and interesting. In only 15 per cent. did environmental conditions alone seem to have determined the entrance into a life of prostitution, the remaining eighty-five per cent. showed some underlying mental or physical defect. All these investigations tend to show that defective mentality is responsible for the presence of prostitution. Prostitution, therefore, will always be with us, as long as we allow mental defectives to propagate. With the presence of prostitution, the venereal scourge will rage among us, unless we can convince men to stay away from contamination. [BR] This course will mean a much larger task than merely lobbying a bill through the legislature for the eradication of prostitution, the common remedy of the reformer. It will come only by the slowest and most difficult of processes and by that hardest of all work in the world, i. e., thinking.