Another check on the efficiency of the program is found in the records as to venereal disease in the Surgeon General's Office. It is hard to get comparative figures because of constantly changing conditions, but it has been shown beyond all doubt that the health conditions in the Army have been far, far better than in the community at large. While the latter are not so bad as the alarmists have implied, they are serious enough in all conscience, when in no fewer than seventeen of the states, sixty or more of every thousand men who appeared at the mobilization camps were found to be infected. Taking a typical month before the signing of the armistice, we find that the proportion of cases coming to the camps from the civil community was fifteen times as great as the proportion among our soldiers in France, even including the soldiers in the port towns, where most of our difficulties there were found. The comparison with the records of the cantonments in this country is even more striking. * * * * * As to the purely religious appeal and its influence on the men it is hard to speak with any degree of certainty. A visiting British general in Washington, shortly after our entry into the war, was asked as to conditions in England, and is reported to have replied, "Upon my soul, if you ask me, I should say that with us the dear old Church has rather missed the bus." In this country the organized religious forces have by no means missed the bus, but if we are honest with ourselves we must face the fact that since the last great national test, the Civil War, other appeals to higher standards of conduct have both actually and relatively been tremendously strengthened, and our religious leaders must address themselves, in the light of experience during these past two years, to a clearer understanding of these other forces and to a closer coöperation with them. We cannot to-day close our eyes to the truth that many of our finest men played their splendid parts quite untouched by a religious motive or appeal--or at least doctrinal appeal; one hesitates to call their attitude a non-religious one. It must always be remembered, however, that their standards, no matter how unconscious they may have been of the fact, were fundamentally based upon the development of a Christian civilization. If thus far I may have seemed to measure soldier conduct by two standards only, by his relation to drink and to women, it is because the results of the policy of the Army in these two matters are measurable, the records are outstanding. The Army and its experience however would furnish but a poor guide to the Churches and the other civilian forces for righteousness if its lessons were limited to the negative virtues, important as they are, of sobriety and continence.