wages they never dreamed they could command. That is a good thing, but it too has its demoralizing side. Money thus unexpectedly possessed threw men and women off their moral balance, and the saloon has flourished.

It is in these contradictory elements in our progress that ammunition is found for optimists and pessimists. The pessimists claim that the evil counterbalances the good. The optimists take the opposite view and history seems to favor the latter.

Medicine itself is likely to gain little from the experience of war. It has taught the surgeons much about the proper application of Listerian principles; physicians, the efficacy of inoculations against diseases which formerly decimated armies; alienists, the effects of shell-shock. But such advances in knowledge, valuable as they are in themselves, have comparatively little application to ordinary life. The practical humanity of the medical officers, shown in so many ways, is indeed a relief to a contest in which angry nations use every means of destruction to exterminate each other. But the blast of war that blows on our ears makes the still small voice of science inaudible.

Some comfort comes from learning that there is no evidence, in Great Britain at least, that since the outbreak of the war the amount of insanity has increased. There has actually been a decrease in hospital admissions, due mainly to the absence of so many men in the army, who are dealt with by the military if they become insane. Among women, the higher wages earned, and the separation allowances regularly received, have relieved domestic uncertainties. Many who had nothing to do previous to the war have forgotten self by throwing their energies into active work for others. Rich and poor alike are now busy all the time. The result is a vast improvement in the nation's mental stability. People whose lives were empty are interested from morning till night. Work is the surest consolation for the grievous sorrow of war.

Even among the soldiers mental disorders have not been as prevalent as expected. The French conclude that with a few exceptions, in which a pre-existent organic taint was always to be found, the war has not been productive of insanity. It were well, quoth the observer, if the opposite could be said, namely, that insanity has not produced the war. What was chiefly feared was

mental disorder among men worn out by the fatigue of the campaign, but such cases have been rare. The circumstances of service in the field react on the mind in so many ways and so differently from the influences of peace that new forms of mental trouble may result.

The experience of the war is certain to lead to better lunacy laws. There has long been complaint that mental disorders have been regarded on a different basis from physical. Though in no department of medicine is the need greater for the earliest treatment, yet the tendency of existing laws is to cause remedial treatment to be postponed. The trouble arises from the fact that the laws governing these matters were framed by lawyers who are concerned in arranging how people are to be protected. But public health asks how mental sufferers are to be best treated so that they may be cured. The lawyer's view-point though important has been allowed to outweigh all others. The war has made it necessary to deal with the problem in a fresh, untrammelled way. Hitherto, the law has hindered early treatment in many cases by making certification necessary for admission to an institution, by inflicting the stigma of pauperism, and by branding the recent case with insanity with all the disastrous consequences that flow therefrom, unjust though they be. The army has brushed these difficulties aside. Numerous cases of recent mental disturbance among the soldiers have been dealt with in special hospitals without being certified insane in the usual way. Out of nearly 4000 such cases among the British troops less than 200 had to be transferred to an insane institution. The soldiers suffer from the stigma neither of insanity nor of pauperism, and there is no obstacle to the earliest and best treatment. A civilian should have the same advantages when a mental breakdown threatens. There is no essential difference between the case of the soldier who becomes insane in the defence of his country, and that of a woman who suffers from mental symptoms brought on by producing her country's defenders.

The maxim that medical science knows no national boundaries has been rudely shaken by the war. The Fatherland has been preparing for isolation from the medical world without its confines. Just as years ago the Kaiser laid his ban on French words in table menus, so as early as 1914 German scientists embarked on a cam

paign against all words which had been borrowed from an enemy country. A purely German medical nomenclature was the end in view. The rest of the world need not grieve much if they show their puerile hate in this way. It will only help to stop the tendency to Pan-Germanism in medicine which has for some years past been gaining headway.

The Germans excel all other nations in their genius for advertising themselves. They have proved true the French proverb that one is given the standing he claims. On a slender basis of achievement they have contrived to impress themselves as the most scientific nation. Never was there greater imposture. They display the same cleverness in foisting on a gullible world their scientific achievements as their shoddy commercial wares. The two are of much the same value, made for show rather than endurance-in short, made in Germany.

While they were preparing men and munitions for their intended onslaught for world dominion, they were spending millions of dollars to win the admiration of both the working classes and the intellectuals of other nations, extolling the superior conditions of the Fatherland, picturing it a paradise, with model homes, short hours and high wages. This was but a cloak for the sinister plans of Prussian autocracy. But how great has been the disillusionment! The facts are its working classes labored longer hours than in any other country and for starvation wages, the women and children toiled like beasts of burden in most strenuous trades, sweat-shops abounded, many suffered from lack of fuel and food, farmers were oppressed with a rigid caste system so arranged that a peasant child could never become other than a peasant. Instead of the villas embowered with flowers, the general mass of workers lived in barrack tenements, gloomy and foul, lacking baths and heat, but with gaudy exteriors as camouflage.

In the earliest months of the war, it was pointed out that there are tendencies in the evolution of medicine as a pure science as it is developed in Germany which are contributing to the increase of charlatanism of which we should be warned. A medical school has two duties-one to medical science, the other to the public. The latter function is the greater, for out of every graduating class 90 per cent are practitioners and less than 10 per cent are scientists. The conditions in Germany are reversed. There, there were 90 physicians dawdling with science to every 10 in practice.

Of these 90, fully 75 per cent were wasting their time. In Germany, the scientific side is over done and they have little to show for it all, while the human side is neglected. Even in their new institutions, splendid as they are in a material sense, it is easy to be seen that the improved conditions were not for the comfort of the patients.

Out of this war some modicum of good may come if it leads to a revision of the exaggerated estimate that has prevailed in Englishspeaking countries of the achievements of the Germans in science. We had apparently forgotten the race that had given the world Newton, Faraday, Stephenson, Lister, Hunter, Jenner, Fulton, Morse, Bell, Edison and others of equal worth. German scientists wait till a Pasteur has made the great discovery, on which it is easy for her trained men to work. She shirks getting for herself a child through the gates of sacrifice and pain; but steals a babe, and as it grows bigger under her care, boasts herself as more than equal to the mother who bore it. Realizing her mental sterility, drunk with self-adoration, she makes insane war on the nations who still have the power of creative thought.

Alienists have been infatuated with German pseudo-discoveries. Novelty of terminology has been taken for originality of thought and their works on insanity have been accorded undue authority. We ignored the substance in our own and the Motherland, and chased the mirage on the Continent.

Since the German army was successful in 1870, it has been idolized, and the admiration bestowed on it has extended, so that in spite of the fact that the Germans themselves have gone to other countries for their ideas, we have cultivated a superstition of German pre-eminence in everything, but especially in science. There might be some excuse for this if they had made any discoveries comparable with those of the circulation of the blood, of vaccination, of asepsis; all made by men who speak our language; or if German names were identified with important lesions or diseases, as are those of Colles, Pott, Bright, Addison, Hughlings Jackson, Hutchinson, Argyll-Robertson and others.

But it is especially in mental science that the reputation of the Germans is most exalted and is least deserved. For every philosopher of the first rank that Germany has produced, the English can show at least three. And in psychiatry, while we have

classical writings in the English tongue and men of our own gifted with clinical insight we need seek no foreign guides, and can afford to let the abounding nonsense of Teutonic origin perish from neglect of cultivation.

The Germans are shelling Paris from their Gothas and their new gun. Murdering innocents, to create a panic in the heart of France! With what effect? The French army cries the louder, they shall not pass; Paris glows with pride to be sharing the soldiers' dangers, and increases its output of war material; and the American army sees why it is in France, and is filled with righteous hatred. Panic nowhere. Vengeance everywhere. What does the Hun know of psychology? His most stupid, thick-witted performance was his brutal defiance of the United States with its wealth, resources and energy. That revealed a mental condition both grotesque and pitiable.

After the war a center of medical activity will be found on this side the Atlantic, and those who have watched the progress medical science has made in the United States will have no misgivings as to your qualifications for leadership. If we learn to know ourselves, great good will come out of this war.

Since 1914, there has been an awakening of the public conscience regarding health. An impetus has been given by the wonderful results of sanitation in the armies. In this we are interested because bodily disorder often foreruns mental, and many cases we treat are due to an infectious disease usually avoidable. Long ago, Disraeli declared that public health is the foundation on which rests the happiness of the people and the strength of the nation. Statesmen generally are only now recognizing that not only is the well-being of many millions of workers involved, but that the development of a country is checked if due attention is not given to the many problems associated with the maintenance of health.

In my home province this spring, the government has created a health department to give at least as much attention to human beings as it has done to domestic animals or the moose that attracts sportsmen to the wilderness. The more grave the situation in France becomes, the more vigorously should we strive to shield those who can assist in greater production from preventable disease and lessened efficiency. The war has impressed us with the fact that the childhood of the nation is the second great line of