The off-hand reformers are too impatient with the slow and toilsome process of competent and judicious sex-education. For them a law, forbidding the marriage of the diseased, suffices to eradicate hereditary syphilis and ophthalmia neonatorum. As a rule, their laws often intensify the very ills they seek to cure. To the average reformer life is presented in a stark and rigid outline. He has no perception of proportions, no knowledge of values. Even when he acquiesce in the slow, patient, laborious study of sex, he is blandly unconscious of distinctions. He at once exaggerates matters. He can not see that the truth about sex may be imparted to the child by parents, family physician or teacher, but that it cannot be acquired by the child from the platform, stage, novel or the ubiquitous magazine. [BS] Lewis (D. Amer. Jour. Derm., 1906) has known girls of thirteen and fourteen years of age quæ conceptaverunt without realizing their condition. The author examined once a gravid girl of seventeen years who had no idea what pregnancy means and where hers resulted from. [BT] Woodruff (Expansion of Races, p. 193) estimates about one million prostitutes in this country. Roe asserts that the average life of these girls is about five years. This means that two hundred thousand prostitutes die every year in the United States and are replaced by new ones, or two hundred thousand girls are led into a life of shame, every year, in this country. [BU] Belaschko’s statistics show that fifty-five per cent. of all the venal women in Berlin come from the great cities and forty-five per cent. from the country. Thirty-four per cent. of these girls belonged to middle-class families and three per cent. of them were graduates from high schools. [BV] Social and not economic conditions, says Nascher, are responsible for most of the prostitution in New York City. Very few are driven to it through want. [BW] Gibb (N. Y. Med. Record, 1907, p. 643), who examined nine hundred children for the society of prevention of cruelty to children, has found girls of nine or ten years of age and even younger with abnormally developed instincts who often submit willingly. The author had once under treatment for chancre a child of eleven years of age who submitted to concubitus for money to be able to buy pretty clothes. Her mother, a widow, was well able to support her and did so. There was no question of poverty. In another case, a girl of twelve, already menstruating, whose mother was in an insane asylum, “tentavit tangere genitalia medici sui,” while being examined for bronchitis. [BX] Clifford G. Roe (in Woman’s World, September, 1909) claims that the average life of the prostitutes is about five years, according to the best statistics.