Religious and Virtuous Deportment and Behaviour, Given at New York the Second Day of April, 1698, Bellomont. GOD SAVE THE KING. Printed by William Bradford, Printer to the King's The affairs of the Association are in the hands of a Board of twenty-one Directors who hold quarterly meetings, and an annual meeting of the Association, at which one-third of their number are subject to retirement or reëlection. The immediate supervision of the association's activities is exercised by an Ex ecutive Committee of seven members of the Board of Directors, elected annually. The administrative details are in the hands of two members of the Executive Committee, who are the executives. The consolidation of these organizations illustrates clearly the swinging back of the pendulum from the complete separation of the church and medicine which has obtained. The early histories of religion and medicine are closely interwoven until science, impatient of the handicaps of church conservatism, forged ahead into the field of modern medicine and became the wonderful profession of applied science which we recognize today as the agency for restoring the sick to health, but the human sympathy of the old "family physician" and the spiritual uplift of religion largely disappeared in the process. After the separation, the church gradually withdrew into its more spiritual and academic advocacy of religious principles, and attempts to prevent the moral breakdown of the people. In recent years, medicine and the church have been coming together again. The recent development of preventive medicine as contrasted with "curative" medicine, and the still more recent development of what may be described as "curative" morals, as contrasted with the preventive morals policy of the church, have accelerated this movement. One does not have to go very far back in years. to find the time when every effort was made to prevent men and women from transgressing the moral standards set by law or prevailing custom, but when once fallen no effort was made to help the transgressor back to the moral level. Today, there are several types of protective leagues and similar organizations, devoting their energies to helping wayward girls or boys to recover their moral balance before serious damage has been done them. When these influences fail, the probation societies, coöperating with the juvenile courts, attempt to check the downward tendency and turn back the probationers to channels of good citizenship. Below the probation work, there has developed a new era of corrective educational work in our institutions for delinquents. These efforts in "curative" morals are a part of the general campaign to reform those who have had moral lapses. The same tendency is seen in the present public discussion of methods for dealing with our prisoners. It is now the accepted policy of many churches to maintain medical clinics in connection with their Parish House services, and of medical schools to maintain Social Service Departments of their hospitals. The application of scientific methods and knowledge to the treatment of moral ills promises in its way as great returns as have followed their application to the treatment of disease, and indirectly promises aid without which the preventive-medicine and "preventive-morals" campaign of social hygiene could not fully succeed. The first work undertaken by The American Social Hygiene Association has been the assembling of accurate information upon all the efforts and experiments that have been thus far attempted in this field. From this study, thus far, several lines of activity seem to warrant general endorsement: First: Efforts to obtain the coöperation of physicians in reporting venereal diseases, in utilizing their opportunity as advisors in their family practice, and in advocating publicly a single standard of morals. Second: The encouragement of diagnostic and advisory work, such as has been so successfully done by the New York Health Department and the Oregon State Board of Health; and of provision for adequate hospital facilities for venereal disease patients. Third: Scientific, constructive, educational lectures such as have been conducted by social hygiene societies for selected groups of shop-workers, department-store girls, and other similar groups. Fourth: The development of serious attention to the problem by parent-teacher associations under the coördinated guidance of medical and moral professional auspices. Fifth: Constructive efforts to give in normal schools and universities definite information upon the sex problem, as teachers will meet it in the course of their school work. It is no doubt appropriate also to advocate this instruction in medical schools and theological seminaries, from which discussion of the social side of such problems is conspicuously absent. The question of teaching sex information in the public schools is on the firing-line, and no one can say what may or may not be wisely given. Experience has generally shown little to be gained by forcing legislation in advance of forming public opinion. Similarly, history shows the same observation to be applicable to attempts to introduce, by legislation or otherwise, the compulsory teaching of physiology and hygiene in the public schools, in ad vance of training teachers in these subjects. It is the consensus of opinion that sex education is necessary, and that the great majority of such instruction must be given by others than the parents, but it does not follow that the schools can immediately do this work. Ultimately this subject, like all important subjects of education, will find its place in the public-school curriculum through distribution in the various scientific and ethical courses adapted to its purpose, and in well-planned special lectures by experienced educators. In the meantime, patience is necessary. Here and there well-planned efforts are being made and should be observed closely. Good work should be promptly recognized and encouraged. Mr. Abraham Flexner has well said, "Swapping absolute ignorance for misinformation will avail the people little." Much of the educational effort of the day accomplishes only this result, and, in general, this problem, like all other preventivemedicine problems, needs to be studied with special reference to attack through environment. In Tennyson's poem, Ulysses, that hero of story and myth, is made to say, "I am part of all that I have met." Probably there is no one in this audience but has locked in his memory some illustration of this statement as applied to times and places where sex information of an untrue and degrading character forcibly touched his environment. We cannot know, in individual instances, when or where influences harmful to the conservation of right sex impulses and standards of morality may be encountered, but we can minimize and eliminate those which are pointed out to us as important and frequent. It is difficult to draw a rational line between genuinely innocent amusements and pleasure resorts, and those with only a veneer of innocence under the cloak of which most undesirable influences are introduced into the environment, but this line should be drawn and the efforts of all social agencies should be directed toward suppressing the latter. We cannot attack mosquito pests as in yellow fever, but we can attack the unprincipled medical charlatans who are the human pests in this field. We cannot completely stamp out prostitution, but we can minimize it and gradually eliminate the commercialized element; and we can do something toward lessening the part alcohol plays in its promotion. We cannot control clandestine intercourse, but we can build up, through social centers, playgrounds, and a multitude of similar agencies, counter-attractions which will go a long way toward combatting it; and we can work for housing conditions which permit of normal family life and that degree of individual privacy necessary to the maintenance of moral standards. We can also work for that adjustment of the cost of living to the bread-winner's earnings which will remove the temptation to exploit the sex function as a means of supplementing the individual or family income. We cannot enforce a single standard of morals, but through broadening our medical ethics to include the responsibility of physicians for protecting a man's wife and children or fiancee, from his disease, we can drive home to men the importance of this standard; and by enacting sane and practical laws for a health certificate for marriage, we may still further develop an observance of this principle of conduct so vitally important to the social hygiene movement. In short, we can bring about the correlation of all those splendid forces, active or potential in every community, which are opposed to sex immorality and contributory to low standards of morals; and we can urge recognition of the fact that, in addition to warning people not to fall into the bottomless pit, it is vitally important to prevent them from dragging others in after them. It is even being discovered worth while to do what may be possible toward restoring to good citizenship and an honorable career those who have fallen. The American Social Hygiene Association hopes to be instrumental in promoting these and similar lines of work throughout the United States, and seeks to become a general clearinghouse for the special campaign against venereal diseases and those degrading practices which largely owe their prevalence to ignorance of the important part which the sex principle plays in the life of the nation as well as of the individual. Its officers believe that this battle must enlist both the medical and moral forces of the country; that it cannot be successfully fought without this alliance, and that independent of the prevention of disease, the results to be gained in minimizing the number of broken homes, shipwrecked lives, handicapped children, and pre |