But what is the guardian to do when the guarded refuse to bear their share of the burden; refuse, indeed, to manifest any calculable interest, except in the way of occasional opposition? Such is the case in Charleston, South Carolina, where every man aspires to do just as his remotest recognizable ancestor did, and the best citizens would all live in trees and eat nuts if they were fully convinced of the truth of the Darwinian theory. Charleston, lovely, romantic, peaceful Charleston, swept by ocean breezes and the highest death rate of any considerable American city; breathing serenely the perfume of its flowers and the bacilli of its in-bred tuberculosis; Charleston, so delightful to the eye, so surprising to the nose! By accident Charleston got an efficient health officer not long ago. A deserved epidemic of smallpox had descended upon the unvaccinated negroes and scared the tranquil city. Dr. J. Mercier Green was called from private practice to tackle the situation. For weeks he waded in the gore of lacerated arms, and his path through darkest Charleston could be followed by rising and falling waves of Afro-American ululations; but he checked the epidemic, and when three months later the city physician died, he got the place. Now, had Dr. Green been wise in his generation, he would have been content to keep his municipal patient reasonably free from smallpox and live a quiet life. But he straightway manifested an exasperating interest in other ailments. He stirred up the matter of the water supply, regardless of the fact that all Charleston's great-great-grandfather had drunk water from polluted cisterns and died of typhoid as a gentleman should. He pitched into doctors nearly old enough to be his own great-great-grandfather because they failed to report diseases properly. He answered back, in the public prints, the unanswerable Good-Old-Way argument. He opined, quite openly, that there was too much tuberculosis, too high an infant mortality, too prevalent a habit of contagious disease, and he more than hinted that the city itself was at fault.