Why is it that men and women-do not want children? If we look abroad we see France decaying for lack of people. That old and polished nation is yearly falling to the rear in its competition with virile Germany. The French themselves perceive the truth with despondency, and they have even tried to encourage childbirth by State bounties. But the population continues to decrease, in spite of the fruitful immigration from less refined countries.

To come home, consider the birth rate of Massachusets, and ask what would become of that old Commonwealth but for the Canadians and the Irish. That State fairly represents New England, and New England extends all over this land. To illustrate this, I will tell what I learned from a young married man who lived in the West twenty years ago. He loved children and wished for a house full of his own; and his wife was one of the old-fashioned women who say: "Give me children or I die." They had three in six years, and then the young couple began to receive advice and instruction. He assured me that within one year seven reputable people told them how to avoid being swamped under an overload of babies. A lady who was influential in matters of education and society, two doctors in a large practice and of good name, and their pastor's wife were among the seven. In the seven families there was but one that had three children, and the advisers all mature men and women. I asked the young fellow what he was going to do about it, and he replied with profane disgust: "Hell! I shan't do anything. The more, the merrier, and my wife agrees with me." That man is gray now. His round

old wife sits amid a band of good children, who adore her. He is well-to-do and full of fun, and he bores me by bragging about the successes of his boys. They could not help being fine chaps with such a mother," he says. He loves her yet and lets her know it every day. I have followed the history of the seven lean families, but it is too sorrowful to repeat, and its incidents would be recognized. There is lamentation

among them. Death and mourning have taken the place of babes that should have been.

LIVES THAT ARE WRECKED.

Those people all had property and education. They had good hearts and fair to fine ability, yet they wrecked their lives. Now the same hopeless insanity of soul can be discerned everywhere except among the Roman Catholics and the Jews. I have found poor crackers in the barren pine woods of the South as determined to avoid offspring and as skillful in the black art as are people on a higher social plane. Even from conservative England, the solid old land that has grown slowly, come vital statistics that show a falling birth rate. Patriotic Englishmen are beginning to warn their country against copying after France.

They are right. It is good citizens that make a sturdy, long-lived nation, and good citizens are made from babies. The country that rejects the infant is rotten at the heart, and dead already. No wealth, education, fine manners, good taste, or achievement in art can take the place of the child. The evil is deep seated and the harder to combat that its votaries fall into it of their own free will, require no organization, supply their own public opinion, and are beyond the reach of the law. The only law that can affect it is the law of God; the only tribunal that can check it is in the individual soul.

The writer sees other dangers. The idea of the family unit has been weakened by easy and respectable divorce, and that is very bad; yet the land would be in better condition with marriage abolished if the people would allow the children to come to their hard home. Socialism and Laborism are threatening black clouds that warn us of a coming hurricane; but if our houses are kept full of children it cannot blow us any permanent harm. The babe is the defender and savior of society.

It is vain for us to recall all our past gains and present prosperity. Wealth; knowledge; care of the poor; right treat

ment of criminal, pauper, and insane classes; the best army and navy of the world; the respectful fear of the whole earth; the triumphs of chemistry; the developments of electricity; the swift improvement of intercommunication; the ease and rapidity of travel; the achievements of great companies in production; the grand rise of our commerce; the public school; the growth of art -they are great, magnificent, admirable; but taken all together they are worthless in comparison with a universal wish for children.

The object of this paper is to make men and women think. We are good people, we are really respectable in spite of some sin. That is certain, for God would not have made us unless it had been worth while. If we meditate, our consciences will recall us to nature and our country will be saved.Siste Viator, in the New York Times.

THE EARLIEST HUMAN BEING.

RECENT speculation regarding the origin of the human race has led to more careful study of some of the earliest known remains, including the so-called "man of spy," the Neauderthal skeleton and the creature human or semi-human-whose bones were discovered several years ago in Java. Two German anatomists, who have given much attention to the subject, are confident that the first-mentioned skeletons must be ascribed to a distinct species of man, which they have named Homo Neauderthaliensis. The Javanese skeleton, which its discoverer calls pithecanthropus (monkey-man), is lower down in the evolutionary scale, and the direct ancestor of both, who may be regarded as the earliest man, must have lived, they think, as far back as the Pliocene period of geological time. Success.

THE HIGH DIGNITY OF WORK.

Who puts back into place a fallen bar, Or flings a rock out of a traveled road, His feet are moving toward the central star, His name is whispered in the gods' abode.

WHEN a few years ago, the late Colonel George E. Waring took charge of the streetcleaning department of New York City, he found the street cleaners doing their work in a careless, carnal, joyless fashion. There was no mind in their muscle, no heart in their handiwork. The men were ashamed of their calling. They went at their work in sloven clothes, with slouching gait, feeling that they were the scavengers of the city, the rejected of men.

Here was labor divorced from ideality. Colonel Waring knew that some ideal light must be made to shine from even the meanest work,-that the worker must have some joy and pride in his toil or his work is a failure. Or, more tragical still, the man himself will be a failure.

What did Colonel Waring do, this man of heart and imagination? Not all that could be done,-not all that ought to be done. But he did something. He called the street sweepers of New York before him, and, with a fine enthusiasm that was infectious, he fired their minds with a sense of their high mission to the city; he made them feel that they were verily the Knights of Cleanliness, the Custodians of the Public Safety, the Guardians of the Public Health. He especially called them to the duty of defending the little children of the metropolis from the wolves of disease.

The words of Colonel Waring stirred the hearts of the workers. For the first time they saw themselves entrusted with a great treasure; felt themselves lifted to a place of dignity and honor; knew themselves to be valued and honored by at least one man of worth and distinction.

Colonel Waring dressed his men in white. uniforms, symbolic of the purity that was to be their aim in all their labors. We all know the result. With this ideal in their

hearts and this man as a center of energy, the workers went out like a white army: the atmosphere clarified, the death-rate went down, New York became, perhaps, the cleanest city in the world.

These men labored at the most humble and thankless work, with some feeling of their partnership with the purifying and protecting powers of the universe. In a degree they worked as gods, not as stolid and joyless hirelings of the hour.

So all true work is more than a deep necessity laid upon life,—more than a precious discipline laid upon the soul. Necessity and discipline, these words are too cold and too hard to express the loftier beauty in the face of Labor.-Edwin Markham in the August Success.

CONFESSIONS OF A JELLY MANU

FACTURER.

"Some pure jelly is put upon the market, but little in proportion, and it is because you housekeepers will not pay the price. You demand low prices, and either don't know or shut your eyes to the fact that it must be adulterated to sell at such a figure. There are many grades of jellies and jams. The eight cents a pound is the bulk of jelly manufactured. Only the sixteen-cent quality is absolutely pure. To the others glucose and apple juice are added in increasing quantities, as the price goes down, until the eight-cent variety can hardly be said to have a trace of currants. Jelly with glucose and apple juice will not stiffen, so a coagulator is used."

My face must have been a study, for he laughed and said: "No kitchen worries with us as to whether jelly will jell! The coagulator is made of alum and sulphuric acid. Color is added, of course, for currants are red. And sweetener, for glucose is not sweet, as commonly supposed. This is usually a coal tar product. I can show. you the equivalent of five hundred pounds of sugar in a tiny bottle. And that is cheap jelly!

"Jam is made in much the same way. Our pure jam retails for twenty-two cents for a twelve-ounce jar; no less. Ten-cent jam has in it a mere trace of fruit. And shall I disgust you further? Apple juice is made from the cores and skins of apples. These are packed in gallon cans ready for use. Not a pretty story, is it? But truth is often ugly. Of course it is true that any chemical that will prevent fruit or fruit juices from fermenting in a barrel will prevent their digesting when eaten." My friend said this quite calmly and indifferently. "In certain states," he went on, "a law compels the contents of any package to be printed on the label, and the sale of the worst stuff diminishes somewhat, but little. Housekeepers don't read the label, or they say it is cheap and tastes good and don't care, and so its sale goes on, for where there is demand there is always supply. When I went into this business my aim was to have all our goods absolutely pure. For two years the words 'glucose,' 'coagulator,' 'sweetener,' 'coloring,' were unknown in our factory vocabulary. I lost money; there was not sufficient demand for pure goods. Housekeepers will not pay twenty-two cents a jar for jam. when they can get some just as good for fourteen and sixteen cents, to say nothing of those who have no taste and like the tencent variety. So I had to sell my pure goods, many of them at a low price. Some buyers got a bargain through my innocence that. time."

I held a glass of clear, beautiful, impure jelly up to the light. "Things are seldom what they seem, but two wrongs don't make a right," I said.

"No, they don't. You start a housekeepers,' crusade," he urged. "If you want pure jellies and jams and will pay a fair price for them, I will make you all you want, and that is the truth."-M. M. in Good Housekeeping.

As an introduction to my paper, I desire, in a few words, to tell you how I became convinced that the X-ray was the only remedy that is of any service in the treatment of cancers of all kinds, lupus and chronic eczema.

Early last Fall, one of my patients had a return carcinoma in the breast. I had amputated it the March before, it had returned with renewed vigor, and I could not conscientiously advise her to submit to a second operation, as she was then very weak and constitutional symptoms had already made their appearance. She saw an article in some magazine that there had been a cancer of the breast cured by the X-ray in Chicago and urged that I should go on and consult with Dr. Gilman, the physician, and see what there was in it. Of course I laughed at her, but went to Chicago, and I must say what I saw surprised me not a little. There were in the hospital, cancers of all descriptions and in all stages, some of the patients I was sure could only live a few hours, and in other cases I was just as sure the ulcers were granulating and closing with healthy tissue. To make a long story short, I came home and reported. The patient, as a last resort went to Chicago, but too late, and died there about Christmas. About a week after I returned, I began thinking over what I had seen and came to the conclusion that there was considerable in the treatment. I

*Read before the Jenkins Medical Society of Yonkers and Mt. Vernon, October meeting.

made up my mind to investigate further and in two days was in Chicago. I remained there until the first of last February; then, having seen and given about 5,000 treatments, I came back, thinking that I at least, knew enough about the X-ray to accomplish some of the results they were achieving there.

I will not burden you with a description of any of the cases that I saw there, except to say, that I saw apparent cures that seemed miraculous, and although laughed at by professional brethren, I could not help believing what I saw, after an experience of 16 years of general practice, considerable of it surgical.

The steps downward in the course of degenerative diseases are well understood and delineated in text-book after text-book, but in the retrograde of recovery from cancer, we find no record of complete recoveries from which to deduce any information.

Heretofore cancer has involved the terror of a death sentence to the afflicted one, but with the present age, we have the promise of rational treatment which will at least considerably reduce the mortality from this increasing scourge.

For many months I have been treating cancer with apparent success. I cannot yet say they are permanently cured on account of the shortness of the time but at any rate the tumors have disappeared and have not yet shown signs of reappearance, so that I am confident of the value of the method

employed, and of its application to all forms of the cancer family, in all locations and in all stages of the disease, under certain limitations.

From my experience, I have divided the applicants for treatment into four classes. The first one I am absolutely certain will get well, and I can assure the patient that the trouble can be removed, with a degree of certainty that may relieve him of all fear for the future. This class embraces all the nodules, indurations, and engorgements out of which spring the malignant growth, external or internal, in their earlier stages; the slow-growing forms, even when of considerable extent, and of considerable duration, and the more easily reached external invasions, such as epithelioma, lupus and what are termed "skin cancers."

The second division of cases includes those in whom cancers have made so much progress that general infection is impending, but has not yet taken place, and no metastases to other internal vital organs, although the invasion of the cancer may be very considerable in extent, and increasing. To these patients I say, "let me treat you a month, and then we will see what the prospect is." The third class includes those terrible cases that are almost moribund, the most of them either having been under the surgeon's knife or with some cancer specialist, who has eaten the tumor out with a speciaì kind of salve, with which he tortures his patient for 18 hours, and who assumes to be the only one in the world who knows its composition. I believe these latter cases are the worst of any to treat. I can only say to such that the X-ray is their only hope and they may try it if they are anxious to avail themselves of such a forlorn hope.

The fourth class includes those who have been operated on, and who come as soon as they can for treatment. They generally include the quick-growing ones, such as the large cell sarcomas and the encephaloid epithelioma, and these varieties, I believe, are the only ones that should have surgical interference, before resorting to the X-ray. To this class of patients, I can say that in

all probability they will get well, as I have seen cancer tissue form in the incision before union had taken place, grow like wild for three weeks, until the X-ray treatment was applied, to vanish like the dew under the sun, when it was commenced, and to disappear not to return.

One of the first cases of my own to recover was a cancer of the liver that I will describe later. It had been explored and the incision closed up, as the duct was involved, and when I made the statement that some internal cases apparently recovered, it was met with incredulity from many of the medical profession. But facts are stubborn things to throw overboard, and one after another experimenter has been delighted, recently, with the results of X-ray work.

At first even among those operators it was believed that only the borderland representative of carcinoma, lupus, could be benefited, nothing else, and no certainty even in this. Later it was conceded that epithelioma might be helped, since the results in lupus were very satisfactory.

Then surface and skin diseases were added to the list of promising possibilities. Yet almost my first case was an internal cancer, and from the penetrating character of the X-ray, its efficiency in any case being admitted, I do not see how its power to control some internal cancers can be logically questioned.

Taking a sensitized plate, placing it at the back of the patient, in front of him place a two-inch plank, in front of the plank a Webster's dictionary, yet through all this the X-ray will penetrate with ample force to imprint on the plate the radiograph of the bones of the body, perfectly, and if continued, long enough will produce X-ray burns and chemical reaction. Gradually the very men, who at first doubted the scope of the X-ray treatment, are now believing that there may be something in it, and I venture to predict that inside of 5 years, when some of its limitations are known, that the whole medical profession will hail its introduction in the treatment of diseases as loudly as they