perfect result. Suddenly he failed to appear for a treatment appointment, and I never saw him again. But I did see a letter written to him by the clinic which showed that he had come up for the examination with a newly acquired sore while he knew I was away--in all probability a reinfection. He was not even man enough to face me with his broken word. Three or four men with chancres may report in an afternoon and leave, the clinic powerless to detain them or to protect others against the damage they may do. One such, a Greek boy, had exposed four different women to infection before we saw him, and only the most strenuous efforts of the entire staff got him into the hospital, because he had neither money nor sense. Half-witted tramps, gang laborers, and foreigners who cannot understand a word of any other language than Lithuanian or some other of the European dialects for which no interpreter can be secured, pass in a steady stream through the free clinics of large cities. The impossibility of securing even the simplest cooeperation from such patients is scarcely realized by any one who is not called upon to deal with them face to face. Even with an interpreter, they display the wilfulness of irresponsibility. One Italian woman wiped her chancre, which was on her lip, with her fingers at every other shake of the head. She was cooking for two boarders and had two children. She did not like hospitals and was homesick and pettish. Would she go over to the dispensary in the next block and find out how to take care of herself? Not a bit of it. She was going home, and she went. I saw the children later in the children's ward, both infected with syphilis--a poor start in life. Criminal intent in the transmission of syphilis is common enough, and the writer can think off-hand of four or five cases in which men or women "got" their estranged partners later in their careers. +The Necessity for Legal Control.+--All these repulsive details have a place in driving home a conception of the cost to society of the immoral and irresponsible syphilitic. Syphilis is an infectious disease, dangerous to the individual and to society. If it is rational to quarantine a mouth and throat full of diphtheria germs, it is rational to quarantine a mouth and throat full of syphilitic germs at least until the germs are killed off for the time being. There can be no more excuse for placing society at the mercy of the one than of the other.