sitions have been advocated before in papers here. I give to those propositions, to his opportune statement of them, and to Mr. Brockway's invaluable practical demonstration of their soundness the small homage of my sincere indorsement and earnest admiration. I can only, as a layman, generalize where these real experts specialize.

And so, unscientifically, but ardently and even passionately, if you will, I wish to give my adhesion to the scientific rather than to the theological estimate and treatment of the problem of sin in the world. Sin is want of conformity unto law. But acts are not wrong merely because they are forbidden. They are forbidden because they are wrong. The law from which sin is a deviation or of which it is a violation should be discovered by the study of nature as well as of Scripture and by the light of science as well as by that of revelation. Men may talk and write and fulminate or refine all they please about original sin or imputed guilt or primordial innocence or the fall. For imputation I read heredity. For guilt I read disease. For punishment I read treatment. Theology and science alike agree in regarding man as the victim of violated law. The thing involved, law, and the creature involved, man, are the same. Disputes around these two points of agreement are important only to those who feel themselves put in trust of dogmas or doctrines. They are not significant to those who would walk on the sure and eternal foundations. Yet, it would seem at times as if man is the only part of creation man does not understand. He dominates all animals, and domesticates many. He fells or creates forests. As a cultivator, he stimulates nature to more beautiful and useful results than nature, unaided, could do. He is the only criminal in the world, because he is the only being in the world who has consciousness of evil doing, who has the perception of better doing, and who has the aspiration and capability of advance. He makes nature his servant in his capacity as the consummate product or the head of creation. Yet he punishes himself by his own laws with less justice and discrimination than he does many of the animals whom he dominates.

Crime should be treated by courts, and crimes should be diagnosed by medical experts in a way, if possible, to restore man to the original purity and innocence predicated of him by theology, or to advance him to such a condition, according to whether the not essentially conflicting terms of theology or science be used. The shibboleth of the first runs thought backward to an earlier estate.

The word of the second would front the mind toward a better future. The law which each would subserve is not that body of statutes passed by legislatures. It is not that body of usages called common law, which is the up-come of experience in the race. It is a code of conformity with the original nature of man claimed by theology or with the possibilities of development before man revealed by science. Either can, not irreverently, be called the establishment of God. The old view has given to us crosses; the new view is filled with schools. The old view has been punctuated by the stake; the new view has been illuminated by industry. Our feet stumble over chopping-blocks, or are entangled in bowstrings or hit against the supports of gallows or encounter the clamps of the electric chair in the blinded ways of the past. By the torch which History puts in our hands on that dreary road are seen whipping-posts, dungeons, punitive prisons, penal colonies, starvation cells, and the like. These have required punishments proportioned to the criminal's supposed measure of injury to others. That domain of moral darkness is sentinelled by sheriffs, jailers, executioners, armies, all for the purpose of guarding men in the mass against the percentage of other men called criminals.

CRIME A CURABLE DIsease.

Thence has been evolved the science of the law as a body of trained men impartially dividing for the protection of the community from the criminal and of the criminal from the community. Hence the intricate mechanism of courts, the serial and appellate system of procedure, with the confessed gain of crime on authority out of proportion to the gain of population and in sarcastic contrast with the progress of religion and of education in the world. Something better than this must be had. The criminal must be protected from himself. Such a study of him as will account for what he is and why he is so, for what he did, and why he did it, must be secured. Such a change of influences as will form in him at least a perception of better things must be effected. Encouragement to right-doing and inducement to it must be supplied.

The criminal is not an instance. He is a type. He is not merely a person. He is a species. He is not merely a transgressor. He is a product. He is not merely a product. He is a reproducer of his kind worsened and intensified. His moral sanitation must be regarded as of vital importance. The commu

nity must be protected from his begetting powers until he can be made a worthy citizen and allowed to become a worthy progenitor. This is where the medical expert should come in. The community should be his patient when the prisoner is his subject. He should prognose the case of posterity when he deals with the contemporary culprit. The prison to him should be a hospital or an asylum. All our jurisprudence should be essentially medical in its intent, scientific in its procedure, and moral in its motive. This is entirely possible within existing instrumentalities.

Our courts can be made to respond to these principles. The profession of law can be made compatible with the advocacy of these truths. The function of the district attorney can be made judicial and morally pathological instead of legally vindictive. With him the criminal defendant's attorney can walk hand in hand on the highway of right instead of reproducing the brutal mimicry of savage war, which should be an impossible travesty and an incredible barbarity in temples dedicated to the justice which is mercy and to the mercy which is justice. Of all of our existing institutions of a judicial and legal character use could be made for the moral medication of so-called crime so as to make its treatment preventive where it is not, curative where it is not, uplifting where it is not, an inspiration and an inculcation of hope where now it only carries occasion for despair and a welcome even to death. In all this we should guard against maudlinism or mushiness, than which nothing is more unscientific. Neither of those forms of weakness, however, is involved when one protests against the herding of criminals together or against the wrong of keeping a man longer in prison than the time required to create in him a character-cure and a character-change. To a cured or a convalescent criminal should be no more denied his discharge than to any other cured or convalescent patient. An incurable criminal should no more be let loose upon the community than the causes, the germs, or the victims of an incurable disease. The medical expert question and the question of other experts in their relation to law and to criminology are involved in the sincere invocation for men and for governments of the realization of the divine purpose in restoring or in reforming, in returning or in upraising, all the children of the universal Father to their highest possibilities of development in the world that now is and in the world that is to come.

IV. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH.

[NOTE.

Dr. W. H. Daly, of Pittsburg, Chairman of the Health Department, arranged a most admirable programme for the Health Section of the Association; but, in consequence of the breaking out of the war between Spain and the United States, Dr. Daly and some of the speakers engaged, including Surgeon-General's Wyman and Sternberg, were immediately called into the active service of the government. This unforeseen event seriously dislocated the programme as arranged, which accounts for the few papers read in the Health Department on Friday. In the absence of Major Daly, Dr. Elmer Lee, of New York, the Secretary of the Department, who ably filled the gap, contributed the following extempore address upon the topic "Health in Camps," the stenographic report of which is herewith submitted. Dr. Lee has had occasion to study the question particularly, in Russia, in previous years.]

I. ADDRESS OF CHAIRMAN LEE.

Since the chairman of this department is in the army, endeavoring to assuage the suffering and alleviate the disease that is now preying upon the soldiers, it has been suggested by your President that some remarks be made on questions as to the health of the army. It was my privilege, three weeks ago, to visit Camp Alger, at Fall Church, Va. The camp, which contained twenty thousand soldiers, is presided over by a surgeon-in-chief, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He is a member of the regular army service, and his assistant is likewise a member of the regular army service; while the entire list of medical assistants, in this corps composed of twenty thousand soldiers, are volunteer surgeons. Therefore there are in this body of twenty thousand soldiers two regular army surgeons. These two men trained in the routine of the medical department are obliged to remain at headquarters, busily engaged from early morning until midnight in examining and passing upon and signing numerous papers of war work. The looking after the health of the soldiers is intrusted to the subordinates. It is evident, of necessity, that the surgeon, while earnest and zealous to do everything that is for the comfort of the

soldier, is necessarily without experience. Most of these physicians are young men, necessarily young men; for the older men do not, as a rule, volunteer. It is difficult for older men to leave their established practice, whereas the young men, without very much practice, seek an opportunity for advancement and promotion.

Unfortunately, in the army, as in private practice, there is no standard of treatment for any given disease. As in private practice, the individual physician is the director of the welfare of the patient; and the comfort of the patient depends upon the individual judgment of the immediate attendant. Thus it is with the care of the soldiers who are sick in their camps. The head physician may be wise and efficient, but he is not in authority to enforce whatever may be his improved and better ideas with reference to sanițation or treatment of the soldiers. Thus it is reduced finally to the point where the soldier is subject to the individual judgment and experience of the regimental surgeon who happens to be placed over him at the time of his sickness.

It has been thought that this is not a wise plan, and it probably will appear to you as to others that it is not a wise plan. The work of the surgeon of experience is spent in clerical duties from morning to night, and an occasional ride through the camp in a cursory way for general observations; but the care which the soldier gets comes directly from the subordinate, not the chief surgeon and his assistant. At all events, I find it so in Camp Alger. The camp was temporarily placed upon a hillside, the drainage was naturally good; but the prevailing misfortune of this camp has been the prevailing misfortune of every camp during the whole of this war, the inadequacy of the water supply. And, although all human beings are dependent upon water, to a very large extent, for health and comfort, it is one of the measures which has not been sufficiently attended to in the preparation of our camps. I had the privilege of making three suggestions. My first suggestion was that in the preparation of the army camp, before the encampment is made, there should be ample provision for drinking water by providing at the head or at the middle of each of the camp streets portable barrels of water, sufficiently cold to be agreeable, but not so cold as to prevent free and sufficient drinking of water. I suggested shower baths as the best form. The provisions for baths did not exist, except in one or two instances where they had been provided at the expense of the officers themselves. Where