Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Conquering an Old Enemy
Heavens! She cried, we can't take him aboard. He isn't dressed! He's-he's naked! The other girl joined in the protest. Their escorts, ignoring all this, continued to row. The girls went hysterical. They clutched at the arms of the rowers. Before that struggle finished, it was too late. The swimmer had gone under for the last time. All this happened, exactly as I tell it, in the Far West when I was a boy.
These were foolish girls, lacking in all sense of proportion. And still, neither you nor I can afford to cast against them the first stone; for this little story is an allegory of the human race. In these United States and in this year of peace 1920, more lives than the whole em pire of Great Britain lost during any year of the Great War will be ?icked out by two diseases which are curable and preventable dis eases. Nor will the year 1920 stand alone. In the four and a half years of intensive warfare between 1914 and 1918, the fifteen civilized nations which fought at Armageddon gave to these twin scourges a heavier toll than they did to bullets, shells, gas, air-bombs, all the ghastly, wholesale killers of modern battle. Yet these two diseases present no mystery to the modern physician. They may be cured; and their infection can be checked at its source. Why, then, have we not acted, we who thought we were civilized? Because we as a world have assumed the attitude of the silly girls in the boat. We have been too nice, too rotten, nasty nice, to organize and come out in open fight against syphilis and gonorrhea.
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