of recruits drawn to the army from country and city populations,
estimate 20 per cent syphilitics among young men who apply for
enlistment, and 5 per cent among the type of young men who enter West
Point and our colleges. It can be pointed out also with justice that the
percentage of syphilis in any class grouped by age increases with the
age, since so few of the cases are cured, and the number is simply added
to up to a certain point as time elapses. Even the army, which
represents in many ways a filtered group of men, passing a rigorous
examination, and protected by an elaborate system of preventions which
probably keeps the infection rate below that of the civil population, is
conceded by careful observers (Nichols and others) to show from 5 to 7
per cent syphilitics. Attention should be called to the difference
between the percentage of syphilis in a population and the percentage
of venereal disease. The inclusion of gonorrhea with syphilis increases
the percentages enormously, since it is not infrequently estimated that
as high as 70 per cent of adult males have gonorrhea at least once in a
lifetime.

On the whole, then, it is conservative to estimate that one man in ten
has syphilis. Taking men and women together on the basis of one of the
latter to five of the former, and excluding those under fifteen years of
age from consideration, this country, with a population of
91,972,266,[5] should be able to muster a very considerable army of
3,842,526, whose influence can give a little appreciated but very
undesirable degree of hyphenation to our American public health. In
taking stock of ourselves for the future, and in all movements for
national solidarity, efficiency, and defense, we must reckon this force
of syphilo-Americans among our debits.

[5] Figures based on 1910 census.