After the most destructive war in all history the conservation of human life is naturally receiving much attention, but illiteracy offers a serious handicap to this noble enterprise. A health car was sent out in one of the states to demonstrate facts concerning preventable diseases, and in a few weeks the director of the car wrote in, “The car will have to be brought in and overhauled. So many people come on it who cannot read and write, the printed charts are not practical.” The car was brought back and glass jars, filled to certain depths with marbles of different sizes and colors to illustrate the mortality of various diseases, were substituted for the charts of letters and figures. This was in the United States--not in Russia, though it reminds one of the system in use in illiterate sections of that country--the placing of pictures over the shops instead of lettered signs, the ringing of bells to indicate the time of trains, and other devices used in a land where illiteracy has long reigned supreme. Law is less respected and law violations are more common where illiteracy flourishes, and the court costs are heavy in such communities as compared with those of education and culture. An investigation made in seventeen typical states in one year showed that the number of convicted criminals from the illiterate portions of those states was seven times as large as from the educated portions. In the most lawless district in Rowan County, I approached the school-house one evening during the third term of the moonlight schools and stopped at the threshold overawed by the unusual scene. The house was filled with men and women and every head was bent over the Bible intently studying. It was indicative of the change which had come over the district with the education of the adults. In the years that followed, the court records, once filled with the misdeeds committed in that district, were left blank. Illiteracy of parents is depriving more children of school advantages than any other one thing. The most illiterate counties in the United States, according to the census of 1910 had an illiteracy of 60.5 percent and 63.1 percent respectively. The former had an average school attendance of 21.2 percent, the latter 24.7 percent--an average in these two counties of less than three out of every ten children in school. Compared with other counties in the same states one with 11.5 percent illiteracy and 63.2 percent school attendance and another with 10.7 percent illiteracy and 67.8 percent school attendance--nearly seven out of every ten children in school--the result of illiteracy on school attendance is striking.