+Value of Conservative Action.+--It cannot be said too often that a reasonable conservatism should temper the ardor of reformers, or more harm than good will be done by the collapse and failure of ill-considered special legislation. Unified action against syphilis and gonorrhea as public health problems is as important as unified action on the problems of railroad control, child labor, or corporate monopoly. For that reason it is a matter of some uncertainty how much can be accomplished by individual states in this country in the way of restrictive legislation, such as that controlling the marriage of infected persons, or punishing persons who fail to carry treatment to the point of cure. Under the direction of a national bureau or department of health administration there is no doubt that the movement against syphilis would advance at a much more rapid pace than with the sporadic and scattered activities of mixed state and private agencies. +The Essential Features of a Modern Campaign.+--The repeated sifting of the facts which has been done in recent years by important investigations, such as that of the Sydenham Commission in Great Britain and the Society for Combatting Sexual Disease in Germany, and the legislative programs already mentioned, have gradually crystallized into fairly definite form, the undoubted essentials of a program for controlling venereal diseases, syphilis among them. These may be summarized as follows: 1. The provision of universally available good treatment, at the expense of the state, if necessary, for the diseases in question. 2. The provision by the state of efficient means of recognizing the diseases at the earliest possible time and with the greatest possible certainty in any given case. 3. The suppression of quack practice, drug-store prescribing, and advertising of cures for these diseases. 4. Moral and educational prophylaxis and the vigorous suppression of prostitution. In addition to these measures, which are common to all proposals and working systems for the control of sexual disease, certain other recommendations may be classed as debatable, inasmuch as they are still under discussion and have been incorporated into some and omitted from others. These are as follows: 1. General instruction in personal prophylaxis for the population at large. 2. Compulsory measures and penalties obliging patients to receive treatment and continue it until cured, regardless of their own desires in the matter. 3. Notification or reporting of cases of sexual disease to the health authorities. 4. Indirect legislation, as it might be called, which aims to detect infected persons before they enter on marriage rather than at the outset of the disease, either by releasing the physician in charge of the case from the bond of professional confidence, or by requiring health certificates before marriage, and which annuls marriages after infection is discovered.