commercialized vice exists, physicians cannot guarantee a city against
the spread of the contagious poison generated by it, which is fatal
alike to the individual and to his offspring. The medical profession
agrees that, as the victims of the social evil inevitably become the
purveyors of germ diseases of a very persistent and incurable type,
safety in this regard lies only in the extinction of commercialized
vice. They point out the indirect ways in which this contagion can
spread exactly as any other can, but insist that its control is
enormously complicated by the fact that the victims of these diseases
are most unwilling to be designated and quarantined. The medical
profession is at last taking the position that the community wishing to
protect itself against this contagion will in the end be driven to the
extermination of the very source itself. A well-known authority states
the one breeding-place of these disease germs, without exception, is the
social institution designated as prostitution, but, once bred and
cultivated there, they then spread through the community, attacking
alike both the innocent and the guilty.

We can imagine, after a dozen years of vigorous and able propaganda of
this opinion on the part of public-spirited physicians and sanitarians,
that a city might well appeal to the medical profession to exterminate
prostitution on the very ground that it is a source of constant danger
to the health and future of the community. Such a city might readily
give to the board of health ordered to undertake this extermination more
absolute authority than is now accorded to it in a small-pox epidemic.
Of course, no city could reach such a view unless the education of the
public proceeded much more rapidly than at present, although the
newly-established custom of careful medical examination of
school-children and of employees in factories and commercial
establishments must result in the discovery of many such cases, and in