Now, although the public has the undoubted right to demand information on this subject, and although, as has been suggested, without admission of the public to the arena of discussion little can be done to diminish the present mortality from Cancer, yet is there real difficulty in communicating knowledge, without engendering unnecessary fear and alarm and sending the hypochondriac to those quacks and charlatans who diagnose non-existent disease in order that they may reap reward by announcing its cure. Some weaker minds there will always be: so, whenever attention is directed towards some public danger, there are those who adopt the possible contingency as a peg on which to hang some ragged vestment of distracted emotion or thought. Thirty years ago, the insane feared the telephone: during the Boer War, many thought that the “scouts were after them”; now-a-days lunatics babble of persecution by wireless, by Bolsheviks, or even by psycho-analysts. So, in Victorian times, the _malades imaginaires_ who then thronged consulting rooms spoke with bated breath of Bright’s disease: to-day, the hysterical secretly hope to hear the blessed word “Colitis”, and the hypochondriac as secretly dread the verdict of “Cancer”! The task of the medical profession is to enlighten the laymen, that their help may be enlisted, and yet to avoid alike exaggeration and smooth sayings, false hopes and false fears. Macaulay, in a familiar passage, once said that there is nothing more ridiculous than the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality. At present, the British Public is less concerned than formerly with questions of morality, but is very much concerned with questions of health. Perhaps it is not so much health that is sought and desired as absence of pain and avoidance of death――which is not quite the same thing. But, though there is nothing intrinsically ridiculous in seeking the “advancement of morality” or the “conquest of disease”, the one, no less than the other, may be pursued in a ridiculous and dangerous manner.