occupied by our military and naval forces. It is silly that an
Englishman should be more afraid of a German soldier than of a
British disease germ, and should clamor for more barracks in the
same newspapers that protest against more school clinics, and cry
out that if the State fights disease for us it makes us paupers,
though they never say that if the State fights the Germans for us
it makes us cowards. Fortunately, when a habit of thought is
silly it only needs steady treatment by ridicule from sensible
and witty people to be put out of countenance and perish. Every
year sees an increase in the number of persons employed in the
Public Health Service, who would formerly have been mere
adventurers in the Private Illness Service. To put it another
way, a host of men and women who have now a strong incentive to
be mischievous and even murderous rogues will have a much
stronger, because a much honester, incentive to be not only good
citizens but active benefactors to the community. And they will
have no anxiety whatever about their incomes.


THE FUTURE OF PRIVATE PRACTICE

It must not be hastily concluded that this involves the
extinction of the private practitioner. What it will really
mean for him is release from his present degrading and
scientifically corrupting slavery to his patients. As I have
already shown the doctor who has to live by pleasing his patients
in competition with everybody who has walked the hospitals,
scraped through the examinations, and bought a brass plate, soon
finds himself prescribing water to teetotallers and brandy or
champagne jelly to drunkards; beefsteaks and stout in one house,