conscience of the race, will no longer tolerate these evils, nor sanction the standard of morals of which they are the outgrowth.

A final word upon the relations of social diseases to the disunion of the family. These diseases play the sinister rôle of detectives in the household-they are les maladies révélatrices, often furnishing positive proof of infidelity, which otherwise might never have been revealed. The frequency of separation or divorce from this cause is far from being suspected by the public. It is one of the hidden, unavowable causes, "the shame that cannot be named for shame." No other commentary upon the intolerable situations created by the introduction of these diseases into the family is needed than the fact that so many women, loyal to the highest ideals of marriage, devoted to home and family, are driven to the divorce courts as a refuge. No one can condemn a self-respecting woman for separating from a man who has dishonored her with a shameful disease.

The evils that result from divorce have been fully exposed; it is time to expose evils that cause divorce; to endeavor to prevent divorce by correcting one, at least, of its most fruitful causes. While the interests of the social welfare demand the conservation of the integrity of the family, it is vain to attempt to preserve intact this corner-stone of our social fabric if we neglect the destructive forces at work undermining its foundation.

DISCUSSION

PROFESSOR SELIGMAN spoke of the economic aspects of the evil and called attention to the great need of publicity.

PROFESSOR A. B. WOLFE, OBERLIN, OHIO

Dr. Morrow's paper is a terrible revelation of the sinister hypocrisy of men in their relation to women and in particular to the women they promise to love, honor, and cherish; a proof positive, if any were needed, that our ideals both of what is manly and womanly need at some points violent revision. The problem of the family is in more ways than one the problem of women. The ideal we hold of woman and the ideal we hold of the family will develop pari passu. So long as our ideal of the strength and worth of woman is a low one-as I do not hesitate to say it was until Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and the modern feminists forced upon us the beginnings of a reluctant revision—as it is yet in fact with the

great masses of men-so long as woman was regarded mainly as a vehicle for sex gratification and a cheap housekeeper combined, so long as it is thought that "the noblest thing any woman can do is to be a good wife and mother," so long as women are not gladly and consciously recognized by men to be a part of the human race as well as bearers of it, that long will the ideal of the family leave much to be desired and the actual family remain a heavy sociological problem.

Much has been said in this discussion concerning publicity and education. The problem of venereal diseases, and of the social evil at large, will never approach a solution until men fully recognize that the wife or the prospective wife-that any woman-is entitled to just as complete a knowledge of these matters as is the male. But so long as women are regarded with a vestige of the old "clinging-vine" ideal, as beings who are to be "protected" (note the pungent irony of that term in this connection) and carefully guarded from knowledge of the world's hard facts, so long as women themselves fondly place a blind faith in a masculine “chivalry," the condescension and subtle contemptuousness of which many of them are at present incapable of perceiving, just so long will they be incapable of protecting themselves from their male protectors. It will in the future be one of the gravest charges the defenders of western civilization will have to meet that with all the civilizing and enlightening agencies it had at its command it so long allowed its ideal of womanhood to remain so purely a negative ideal. Let woman be only "pure" and "innocent," let her only guard her "virtue" (or have it guarded for her) against the wiles and attacks of the predatory male, let her at the same time have a pretty face, a lithe figure, and a "charming" way, and she was essentially the ideal woman. No woman whose chief ideality or virtue consists in purity or "innocence" can ever be other than an obstacle in the way of the solution of the twin problems of marriage and prostitution.

When we talk about publicity and education we mean that the social consciousness should be opened to these social dangers of contagious vice and disease. When, as in this case, the matter in hand concerns women as well as men, it behooves us, both men and women, to include women in that social consciousness, to recognize that they should have equal part with men in the formation and direction of the social consciousness. No recent writer on sociology has said a thing more pregnant with significant truth than Professor Thomas when he says that women are in the white man's world but not of it, and nowhere have I seen that fact more vividly illustrated than by the acknowledged effects of the "medical secret" of the physician, a man-made bit of professional ethics that sacrifices everything -wife, children, honor, health, and social welfare-to the supposed interest of the libertine male, even though he be "to a radiant angel linked.” Whatever the present legal status of the medical secret, it seems clear that that institution could not long survive under the light and fire of a public

opinion which women had equal part with men in shaping. For no sane woman would consent to the fallacious belief that the sanctity and unity of the home is to be maintained on the basis of collusion of husband and physician to deceive an ignorant though suffering wife. It may be necessary that women live more than men in what Professor Patten has called a pain-economy, but surely to ask them to live in a fool's paradise at the same time is to add insult to injury. There are other stagnant pools than simply that of male disease upon which the searchlight of inquiry should be turned. It would be well to turn it oftener and with greater intensity upon male egotism-upon the androcentricity of society, the root evil of which maladjustments in family and sex life are only too often the specific manifestations. Even the American Sociological Society, while it is extremely fortunate in having women as well as men speakers on its programmes, has not entirely escaped the androcentric world-view.

MRS. ANNA GARLIN SPENCER, NEW YORK CITY, N. Y.

Two things are most encouraging to note in connection with this subject. One is that the members of the medical profession have for the first time come fairly upon the platform of social responsibility in respect to these social diseases. Their oath, their tradition of care for the individual patient, the sanctity of the medical confessional, have all bound the doctors until lately to a purely personal duty in this regard. Gradually the idea of saving the social cost of other preventable diseases has deepened and grown, until we have boards of health and medical officials of various kinds at work to prevent typhoid and other scourges, to segregate and radically treat, even at public expense, those ill of contagious disease, in order that they may not help to spread the evil; and now tuberculosis is to be brought under control. The physician has fallen heir to the position of social command once held by the priest; and for the reason that we are all so concerned now-a-days with the physical basis of life and of well-being. The valuable paper by Dr. Morrow shows us that the "great black plague," a preventable and terrible scourge of humanity, is to be proceeded against and to be brought under control. And the encouraging thing is that the doctors, now recognizing their responsibility of leadership in this matter, are giving the public the facts they alone can give and assuming their proper place in preventive as well as in ameliorative effort. One can hardly realize how great an advance in the sense of social duty this marks in the medical profession, unless he remembers that great struggle in England over the Contagious Diseases Acts, and the attitude which the doctors took in that seven years' fight against the state legalization of prostitution. The physicians then generally took the ground of duty to try and save men from the consequences of sexual irregularity, while condemning women prostitutes to a slavery the most hopeless and most degrading that any

class of human beings has ever suffered. The position now taken by Dr. Morrow and other physicians in the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis is that all means for cure and amelioration should be freely accessible to all, men and women alike; that the home and innocent wives and children should be protected as far as possible; but that the final and most effective measures for wiping out this evil are moral and educational. We may congratulate ourselves on this great movement forward of the medical profession as one of the largest of social gains.

The second thing that is cause for congratulation and for hope in regard to the curbing of social diseases is the new solidarity of women, and the way in which that is working for the protection of the poorer and weaker womanhood. Social diseases imply prostitution, and it is the ignorant and poor among women who furnish the larger portion of prostitutes. The one most effective way to lessen the social evil, and the diseases that it causes, would be to make every young girl self-supporting with a living wage. And the best, the strongest, the most fortunate womanhood is at work to secure that end. By means of trade schools and welfare work and leagues of protection and help for the working girl, they are seeking to make girls too strong and too fairly paid to be such easy victims as they have been. There is a new sex-consciousness, which sometimes shows itself in unlovely forms, but which is really a testimony to social growth, which is making women help women. They are no longer willing that the sacred, seamless, robe of womanhood shall be torn asunder and one part dedicated to honor in the home and the other part given over to dishonor in the dark places of sin. This sense of belonging together is new among women but it is working toward a higher estinate of potential motherhood and a deeper sense of responsibility toward all the weak and poor and ignorant girlhood on the part of the women of character and social power. This will mean that while the doctors are working in the noble way indicated in Dr. Morrow's paper to lessen social diseases, the best womanhood will be working more and more to lessen the supply of “abandoned" women whose degradation is concerned in those diseases. We ought to protect the home. We ought also to protect all youth from that which hurts the home.

THE INFLUENCE OF INCOME ON STANDARDS OF

LIFE

PROFESSOR R. C. CHAPIN

Beloit College, Beloit, Wis.

It goes without saying that the standard of living attained does not depend simply upon income. The natural environmentclimate, the free gifts of nature-the social environment, whether urban or rural, the efficiency of government, the opportunities for recreation and education which are provided gratuitously— all these have a marked influence upon the plane of life that men attain. Furthermore, the actual comfort enjoyed by a given family depends hardly less upon the amount of its income than upon the wisdom displayed in applying it to the diverse wants which it may be made to meet. The woman who "looketh well to the ways of her household" is as important a factor in our time as she was in the days of King Lemuel.

But into these wide aspects of the question it is not my business to enter. I shall deal with the influence upon the standard of living of income alone, and I purpose to consider the effect upon the standard, first, of variations in amount of income; second, of variations in sources of income. I shall draw for illustration largely upon the results of an investigation into the standard of living in New York City carried on in 1907 under the direction of a committee of the New York State Conference of Charities. Returns were compiled from 391 families of four, five, and six persons each, 318 having incomes between $600 and $1,100.

I. Variations in amount of income. It is plain that the larger the income, the larger are the possibilities of satisfaction. One of the evidences of a general rise of real wages in the nineteenth century is the increase in the number and kind of good things that are within reach of the ordinary man, and actually in his possession. We know, that is, that the rise of the standard