6. To take an active interest in the administration of all such branches of the city government as have a direct bearing on public health, and 7. To provide for a combined expression of opinion on matters relating to public health. At the first of their conferences on the city’s health, members of the Council discussed the problem with the police commissioner and the health commissioner and there was an exchange of viewpoints that was of inestimable value. At the great Hygienic Congress held at Buffalo in 1914 women were prominent during the sessions and they helped largely to awaken public interest in the meeting. Report had it that 7,000 representatives of women’s clubs coöperated to secure the participation of school and civic authorities in the Congress. At the Fifteenth International Congress of Hygiene and Demography which was held in Washington, D. C., last year, women not only participated but furnished one of the most interesting features of the event—a notable health exhibit. If Lord Beaconsfield’s test of statesmanship were applied today, women would be seen to qualify. CHAPTER III THE SOCIAL EVIL The awakening of women to the low social status of their sex is the most encouraging fact of the century. With the revelations which have come both from women and from men physicians, nurses, and scientists of the causes, spread, and effects of venereal diseases, the conscience and intelligence of women have fairly leaped in response to the demand made upon them for recognition of the situation and for remedies and prevention. Their work here as elsewhere has been varied; for the problem of prevention is complex, many causes more or less combining to produce the undesirable vice conditions. There are those, for example, who make underfeeding—malnutrition—responsible for the physical and mental defects which distort the mind and the will and which feed houses of prostitution and the clandestine trade. Others lay emphasis upon the liquor traffic and refer to the obvious connection between bars and dance halls, between liquor and feeble-mindedness and degeneracy in general. Yet others see in the commercial spirit of the age and the avarice for profits and unearned livelihoods the basis of sex vice. Education, the responsibility of doctors and parents, marriage laws and customs, recreation, labor conditions and wages all receive their emphasis in the discussion of the causes of sex irregularities and morbidity.