The principle of the compulsory notification of venereal diseases seems to have been first established in Prussia, where it dates from 1835. The system here, however, is only partial, not being obligatory in all cases but only when in the doctor's opinion secrecy might be harmful to the patient himself or to the community; it is only obligatory when the patient is a soldier. This method of notification is indeed on a wrong basis, it is not part of a comprehensive sanitary system but merely an auxiliary to police methods of dealing with prostitution. According to the Scandinavian system, notification, though not an essential part of this system, rests on an entirely different basis.

The Scandinavian plan in a modified form has lately been established in Denmark. This little country, so closely adjoining Germany, for some time followed in this matter the example of its great neighbor and adopted the police regulation of prostitution and venereal disease. The more fundamental Scandinavian affinities of Denmark were, however, eventually asserted, and in 1906, the system of regulation was entirely abandoned and Denmark resolved to rely on thorough and systematic application of the sanitary principle already accepted in the country, although something of German influence still persists in the strict regulation of the streets and the penalties imposed upon brothel-keepers, leaving prostitution itself free. The decisive feature of the present system is, however, that the sanitary authorities are now exclusively medical. Everyone, whatever his social or financial position, is entitled to the free treatment of venereal disease. Whether he avails himself of it or not, he is in any case bound to undergo treatment. Every diseased person is thus, so far as it can be achieved, in a doctor's hands. All doctors have their instructions in regard to such cases, they have not only to inform their patients that they cannot marry so long as risks of infection are estimated to be present, but that they are liable for the expenses of treatment, as well as the dangers suffered, by any persons whom they may infect. Although it has not been possible to make the system at every point thoroughly operative, its general success is indicated by the entire reliance now placed on it, and the abandonment of the police regulation of prostitution. A system very similar to that of Denmark was established some years previously in Norway. The principle of the treatment of venereal disease at the public expense exists also in Sweden as well as in Finland, where treatment is compulsory.[243]

It can scarcely be said that the principle of notification has yet been properly applied on a large scale to venereal diseases. But it is constantly becoming more widely advocated, more especially in England and the United States,[244] where national temperament and political traditions render the system of the police regulation of prostitution impossible—even if it were more effective than it practically is—and where the system of dealing with venereal disease on the basis of public health has to be recognized as not only the best but the only possible system.[245]

In association with this, it is necessary, as is also becoming ever more widely recognized, that there should be the most ample facilities for the gratuitous treatment of venereal diseases; the general establishment of free dispensaries, open in the evenings, is especially necessary, for many can only seek advice and help at this time. It is largely to the systematic introduction of facilities for gratuitous treatment that the enormous reduction in venereal disease in Sweden, Norway, and Bosnia is attributed. It is the absence of the facilities for treatment, the implied feeling that the victims of venereal disease are not sufferers but merely offenders not entitled to care, that has in the past operated so disastrously in artificially promoting the dissemination of preventable diseases which might be brought under control.

If we dispense with the paternal methods of police regulation, if we rely on the general principles of medical hygiene, and for the rest allow the responsibility for his own good or bad actions to rest on the individual himself, there is a further step, already fully recognized in principle, which we cannot neglect to take: We must look on every person as accountable for the venereal diseases he transmits. So long as we refuse to recognize venereal diseases as on the same level as other infectious diseases, and so long as we offer no full and fair facilities for their treatment, it is unjust to bring the individual to account for spreading them. But if we publicly recognize the danger of infectious venereal diseases, and if we leave freedom to the individual, we must inevitably declare, with Duclaux, that every man or woman must be held responsible for the diseases he or she communicates.

According to the Oldenburg Code of 1814 it was a punishable offence for a venereally diseased person to have sexual intercourse with a healthy person, whether or not infection resulted. In Germany to-day, however, there is no law of this kind, although eminent German legal authorities, notably Von Liszt, are of opinion that a paragraph should be added to the Code declaring that sexual intercourse on the part of a person who knows that he is diseased should be punishable by imprisonment for a period not exceeding two years, the law not to be applied as between married couples except on the application of one of the parties. At the present time in Germany the transmission of venereal disease is only punishable as a special case of the infliction of bodily injury.[246] In this matter Germany is behind most of the Scandinavian countries where individual responsibility for venereal infection is well recognized and actively enforced.

In France, though the law is not definite and satisfactory, actions for the transmission of syphilis are successfully brought before the courts. Opinion seems to be more decisively in favor of punishment for this offense than it is in Germany. In 1883 Despres discussed the matter and considered the objections. Few may avail themselves of the law, he remarks, but all would be rendered more cautious by the fear of infringing it; while the difficulties of tracing and proving infection are not greater, he points out, than those of tracing and proving paternity in the case of illegitimate children. Despres would punish with imprisonment for not more than two years any person, knowing himself to be diseased, who transmitted a venereal disease, and would merely fine those who communicated the contagion by imprudence, not realizing that they were diseased.[247] The question has more recently been discussed by Aurientis in a Paris thesis. He states that the present French law as regards the transmission of sexual diseases is not clearly established and is difficult to act upon, but it is certainly just that those who have been contaminated and injured in this way should easily be able to obtain reparation. Although it is admitted in principle that the communication of syphilis is an offence even under common law he is in agreement with those who would treat it as a special offence, making a new and more practical law.[248] Heavy damages are even at the present time obtained in the French courts from men who have infected young women in sexual intercourse, and also from the doctors as well as the mothers of syphilitic infants who have infected the foster-mothers they were entrusted to. Although the French Penal Code forbids in general the disclosure of professional secrets, it is the duty of the medical practitioner to warn the foster-mother in such a case of the danger she is incurring, but without naming the disease; if he neglects to give this warning he may be held liable.

In England, as well as in the United States, the law is more unsatisfactory and more helpless, in relation to this class of offences, than it is in France. The mischievous and barbarous notion, already dealt with, according to which venereal disease is the result of illicit intercourse and should be tolerated as a just visitation of God, seems still to flourish in these countries with fatal persistency. In England the communication of venereal disease by illicit intercourse is not an actionable wrong if the act of intercourse has been voluntary, even although there has been wilful and intentional concealment of the disease. Ex turpi causa non oritur actio, it is sententiously said; for there is much dormitative virtue in a Latin maxim. No legal offence has still been committed if a husband contaminates his wife, or a wife her husband.[249] The "freedom" enjoyed in this matter by England and the United States is well illustrated by an American case quoted by Dr. Isidore Dyer, of New Orleans, in his report to the Brussels Conference on the Prevention of Venereal Diseases, in 1899: "A patient with primary syphilis refused even charitable treatment and carried a book wherein she kept the number of men she had inoculated. When I first saw her she declared the number had reached two hundred and nineteen and that she would not be treated until she had had revenge on five hundred men." In a community where the most elementary rules of justice prevailed facilities would exist to enable this woman to obtain damages from the man who had injured her or even to secure his conviction to a term of imprisonment. In obtaining some indemnity for the wrong done her, and securing the "revenge" she craved, she would at the same time have conferred a benefit on society. She is shut out from any action against the one person who injured her; but as a sort of compensation she is allowed to become a radiating focus of disease, to shorten many lives, to cause many deaths, to pile up incalculable damages; and in so doing she is to-day perfectly within her legal rights. A community which encourages this state of things is not only immoral but stupid.

There seems, however, to be a growing body of influential opinion, both in England and in the United States, in favor of making the transmission of venereal disease an offence punishable by heavy fine or by imprisonment.[250] In any enactment no stress should be put on the infection being conveyed "knowingly." Any formal limitation of this kind is unnecessary, as in such a case the Court always takes into account the offender's ignorance or mere negligence, and it is mischievous because it tends to render an enactment ineffective and to put a premium on ignorance; the husbands who infect their wives with gonorrhoea immediately after marriage have usually done so from ignorance, and it should be at least necessary for them to prove that they have been fortified in their ignorance by medical advice. It is sometimes said that the existing law could be utilized for bringing actions of this kind, and that no greater facilities should be offered for fear of increasing attempts at blackmail. The inutility of the law at present for this purpose is shown by the fact that it seldom or never happens that any attempt is made to utilize it, while not only are there a number of existing punishable offences which form the subject of attempts at blackmail, but blackmail can still be demanded even in regard to disreputable actions that are not legally punishable at all. Moreover, the attempt to levy blackmail is itself an offence always sternly dealt with in the courts.

It is possible to trace the beginning of a recognition that the transmission of a venereal disease is a matter of which legal cognizance may be taken in the English law courts. It is now well settled that the infection of a wife by her husband may be held to constitute the legal cruelty which, according to the present law, must be proved, in addition to adultery, before a wife can obtain divorce from her husband. In 1777 Restif de la Bretonne proposed in his Gynographes that the communication of a venereal disease should itself be an adequate ground for divorce; this, however, is not at present generally accepted.[251]

It is sometimes said that it is very well to make the individual legally responsible for the venereal disease he communicates, but that the difficulties of bringing that responsibility home would still remain. And those who admit these difficulties frequently reply that at the worst we should have in our hands a means of educating responsibility; the man who deliberately ran the risk of transmitting such infection would be made to feel that he was no longer fairly within his legal rights but had done a bad action. We are thus led on finally to what is now becoming generally recognized as the chief and central method of combating venereal disease, if we are to accept the principle of individual responsibility as ruling in this sphere of life. Organized sanitary and medical precautions, and proper legal protection for those who have been injured, are inoperative without the educative influence of elementary hygienic instruction placed in the possession of every young man and woman. In a sphere that is necessarily so intimate medical organization and legal resort can never be all-sufficing; knowledge is needed at every step in every individual to guide and even to awaken that sense of personal moral responsibility which must here always rule. Wherever the importance of these questions is becoming acutely realized—and notably at the Congresses of the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease—the problem is resolving itself mainly into one of education.[252] And although opinion and practice in this matter are to-day more advanced in Germany than elsewhere the conviction of this necessity is becoming scarcely less pronounced in all other civilized countries, in England and America as much as in France and the Scandinavian lands.

A knowledge of the risks of disease by sexual intercourse, both in and out of marriage,—and indeed, apart from sexual intercourse altogether,—is a further stage of that sexual education which, as we have already seen, must begin, so far as the elements are concerned, at a very early age. Youths and girls should be taught, as the distinguished Austrian economist, Anton von Menger wrote, shortly before his death, in his excellent little book, Neue Sittenlehre, that the production of children is a crime when the parents are syphilitic or otherwise incompetent through transmissible chronic diseases. Information about venereal disease should not indeed be given until after puberty is well established. It is unnecessary and undesirable to impart medical knowledge to young boys and girls and to warn them against risks they are yet little liable to be exposed to. It is when the age of strong sexual instinct, actual or potential, begins that the risks, under some circumstances, of yielding to it, need to be clearly present to the mind. No one who reflects on the actual facts of life ought to doubt that it is in the highest degree desirable that every adolescent youth and girl ought to receive some elementary instruction in the general facts of venereal disease, tuberculosis, and alcoholism. These three "plagues of civilization" are so widespread, so subtle and manifold in their operation, that everyone comes in contact with them during life, and that everyone is liable to suffer, even before he is aware, perhaps hopelessly and forever, from the results of that contact. Vague declamation about immorality and vaguer warnings against it have no effect and possess no meaning, while rhetorical exaggeration is unnecessary. A very simple and concise statement of the actual facts concerning the evils that beset life is quite sufficient and adequate, and quite essential. To ignore this need is only possible to those who take a dangerously frivolous view of life.

It is the young woman as much as the youth who needs this enlightenment. There are still some persons so ill-informed as to believe that though it may be necessary to instruct the youth it is best to leave his sister unsullied, as they consider it, by a knowledge of the facts of life. This is the very reverse of the truth. It is desirable indeed that all should be acquainted with facts so vital to humanity, even although not themselves personally concerned. But the girl is even more concerned than the youth. A man has the matter more within his own grasp, and if he so chooses he may avoid all the grosser risks of contact with venereal disease. But it is not so with the woman. Whatever her own purity, she cannot be sure that she may not have to guard against the possibility of disease in her future husband as well as in those to whom she may entrust her child. It is a possibility which the educated woman, so far from being dispensed from, is more liable to encounter than is the working-class woman, for venereal disease is less prevalent among the poor than the rich.[253] The careful physician, even when his patient is a minister of religion, considers it his duty to inquire if he has had syphilis, and the clergyman of most severely correct life recognizes the need of such inquiry and may perhaps smile, but seldom feels himself insulted. The relationship between husband and wife is even much more intimate and important than that between doctor and patient, and a woman is not dispensed from the necessity of such inquiry concerning her future husband by the conviction that the reply must surely be satisfactory. Moreover, it may well be in some cases that, if she is adequately enlightened, she may be the means of saving him, before it is too late, from the guilt of premature marriage and its fateful consequences, so deserving to earn his everlasting gratitude. Even if she fails in winning that, she still has her duty to herself and to the future race which her children will help to form.

In most countries there is a growing feeling in favor of the enlightenment of young women equally with young men as regards venereal diseases. Thus in Germany Max Flesch, in his Prostitution und Frauenkrankheiten, considers that at the end of their school days all girls should receive instruction concerning the grave physical and social dangers to which women are exposed in life. In France Duclaux (in his L'Hygiene Sociale) is emphatic that women must be taught. "Already," he states, "doctors who by custom have been made, in spite of themselves, the husband's accomplices, will tell you of the ironical gaze they sometimes encounter when they seek to lead a wife astray concerning the causes of her ills. The day is approaching of a revolt against the social lie which has made so many victims, and you will be obliged to teach women what they need to know in order to guard themselves against you." It is the same in America. Reform in this field, Isidore Dyer declares, must emblazon on its flag the motto, "Knowledge is Health," as well of mind as of body, for women as well as for men. In a discussion introduced by Denslow Lewis at the annual meeting of the American Medical Association in 1901 on the limitation of venereal diseases (Medico-Legal Journal, June and September, 1903), there was a fairly general agreement among all the speakers that almost or quite the chief method of prevention lay in education, the education of women as much as of men. "Education lies at the bottom of the whole thing," declared one speaker (Seneca Egbert, of Philadelphia), "and we will never gain much headway until every young man, and every young woman, even before she falls in love and becomes engaged, knows what these diseases are, and what it will mean if she marries a man who has contracted them." "Educate father and mother, and they will educate their sons and daughters," exclaims Egbert Grandin, more especially in regard to gonorrhoea (Medical Record, May 26, 1906); "I lay stress on the daughter because she becomes the chief sufferer from inoculation, and it is her right to know that she should protect herself against the gonorrhoeic as well as against the alcoholic."

We must fully face the fact that it is the woman herself who must be accounted responsible, as much as a man, for securing the right conditions of a marriage she proposes to enter into. In practice, at the outset, that responsibility may no doubt be in part delegated to parents or guardians. It is unreasonable that any false delicacy should be felt about this matter on either side. Questions of money and of income are discussed before marriage, and as public opinion grows sounder none will question the necessity of discussing the still more serious question of health, alike that of the prospective bridegroom and of the bride. An incalculable amount of disease and marital unhappiness would be prevented if before an engagement was finally concluded each party placed himself or herself in the hands of a physician and authorized him to report to the other party. Such a report would extend far beyond venereal disease. If its necessity became generally recognized it would put an end to much fraud which now takes place when entering the marriage bond. It constantly happens at present that one party or the other conceals the existence of some serious disease or disability which is speedily discovered after marriage, sometimes with a painful and alarming shock—as when a man discovers his wife in an epileptic fit on the wedding night—and always with the bitter and abiding sense of having been duped. There can be no reasonable doubt that such concealment is an adequate cause of divorce. Sir Thomas More doubtless sought to guard against such frauds when he ordained in his Utopia that each party should before marriage be shown naked to the other. The quaint ceremony he describes was based on a reasonable idea, for it is ludicrous, if it were not often tragic in its results, that any person should be asked to undertake to embrace for life a person whom he or she has not so much as seen.

It may be necessary to point out that every movement in this direction must be the spontaneous action of individuals directing their own lives according to the rules of an enlightened conscience, and cannot be initiated by the dictation of the community as a whole enforcing its commands by law. In these matters law can only come in at the end, not at the beginning. In the essential matters of marriage and procreation laws are primarily made in the brains and consciences of individuals for their own guidance. Unless such laws are already embodied in the actual practice of the great majority of the community it is useless for parliaments to enact them by statute. They will be ineffective or else they will be worse than ineffective by producing undesigned mischiefs. We can only go to the root of the matter by insisting on education in moral responsibility and instruction, in matters of fact.

The question arises as to the best person to impart this instruction. As we have seen there can be little doubt that before puberty the parents, and especially the mother, are the proper instructors of their children in esoteric knowledge. But after puberty the case is altered. The boy and the girl are becoming less amenable to parental influence, there is greater shyness on both sides, and the parents rarely possess the more technical knowledge that is now required. At this stage it seems that the assistance of the physician, of the family doctor if he has the proper qualities for the task, should be called in. The plan usually adopted, and now widely carried out, is that of lectures setting forth the main facts concerning venereal diseases, their dangers, and allied topics.[254] This method is quite excellent. Such lectures should be delivered at intervals by medical lecturers at all urban, educational, manufacturing, military, and naval centres, wherever indeed a large number of young persons are gathered together. It should be the business of the central educational authority either to carry them out or to enforce on those controlling or employing young persons the duty of providing such lectures. The lectures should be free to all who have attained the age of sixteen.

In Germany the principle of instruction by lectures concerning venereal diseases seems to have become established, at all events so far as young men are concerned, and such lectures are constantly becoming more usual. In 1907 the Minister of Education established courses of lectures by doctors on sexual hygiene and venereal diseases for higher schools and educational institutions, though attendance was not made compulsory. The courses now frequently given by medical men to the higher classes in German secondary schools on the general principles of sexual anatomy and physiology nearly always include sexual hygiene with special reference to venereal diseases (see, e.g., Sexualpaedagogik, pp. 131-153). In Austria, also, lectures on personal hygiene and the dangers of venereal disease are delivered to students about to leave the gymnasium for the university; and the working men's clubs have instituted regular courses of lectures on the same subjects delivered by physicians. In France many distinguished men, both inside and outside the medical profession, are working for the cause of the instruction of the young in sexual hygiene, though they have to contend against a more obstinate degree of prejudice and prudery on the part of the middle class than is to be found in the Germanic lands. The Commission Extraparlementaire du Regime des Moeurs, with the conjunction of Augagneur, Alfred Fournier, Yves Guyot, Gide, and other distinguished professors, teachers, etc., has lately pronounced in favor of the official establishment of instruction in sexual hygiene, to be given in the highest classes at the lycees, or in the earliest class at higher educational colleges; such instruction, it is argued, would not only furnish needed enlightenment, but also educate the sense of moral responsibility. There is in France, also, an active and distinguished though unofficial Societe Francaise de Prophylaxie Sanitaire et Morale, which delivers public lectures on sexual hygiene. Fournier, Pinard, Burlureaux and other eminent physicians have written pamphlets on this subject for popular distribution (see, e.g., Le Progres Medical of September, 1907). In England and the United States very little has yet been done in this direction, but in the United States, at all events, opinion in favor of action is rapidly growing (see, e.g., W.A. Funk, "The Venereal Peril," Medical Record, April 13, 1907). The American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis (based on the parent society founded in Paris in 1900 by Fournier) was established in New York in 1905. There are similar societies in Chicago and Philadelphia. The main object is to study venereal diseases and to work toward their social control. Doctors, laymen, and women are members. Lectures and short talks are now given under the auspices of these societies to small groups of young women in social settlements, and in other ways, with encouraging success; it is found to be an excellent method of reaching the young women of the working classes. Both men and women physicians take part in the lectures (Clement Cleveland, Presidential Address on "Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases," Transactions American Gynecological Society, Philadelphia, vol. xxxii, 1907).

An important auxiliary method of carrying out the task of sexual hygiene, and at the same time of spreading useful enlightenment, is furnished by the method of giving to every syphilitic patient in clinics where such cases are treated a card of instruction for his guidance in hygienic matters, together with a warning of the risks of marriage within four or five years after infection, and in no case without medical advice. Such printed instruction, in clear, simple, and incisive language, should be put into the hands of every syphilitic patient as a matter of routine, and it might be as well to have a corresponding card for gonorrhoeal patients. This plan has already been introduced at some hospitals, and it is so simple and unobjectionable a precaution that it will, no doubt, be generally adopted. In some countries this measure is carried out on a wider scale. Thus in Austria, as the result of a movement in which several university professors have taken an active part, leaflets and circulars, explaining briefly the chief symptoms of venereal diseases and warning against quacks and secret remedies, are circulated among young laborers and factory hands, matriculating students, and scholars who are leaving trade schools.

In France, where great social questions are sometimes faced with a more chivalrous daring than elsewhere, the dangers of syphilis, and the social position of the prostitute, have alike been dealt with by distinguished novelists and dramatists. Huysmans inaugurated this movement with his first novel, Marthe, which was immediately suppressed by the police. Shortly afterwards Edmond de Goncourt published La Fille Elisa, the first notable novel of the kind by a distinguished author. It was written with much reticence, and was not indeed a work of high artistic value, but it boldly faced a great social problem and clearly set forth the evils of the common attitude towards prostitution. It was dramatized and played by Antoine at the Theatre Libre, but when, in 1891, Antoine wished to produce it at the Porte-Saint-Martin Theatre, the censor interfered and prohibited the play on account of its "contexture generale." The Minister of Education defended this decision on the ground that there was much in the play that might arouse repugnance and disgust. "Repugnance here is more moral than attraction," exclaimed M. Paul Deroulede, and the newspapers criticized a censure which permitted on the stage all the trivial indecencies which favor prostitution, but cannot tolerate any attack on prostitution. In more recent years the brothers Margueritte, both in novels and in journalism, have largely devoted their distinguished abilities and high literary skill to the courageous and enlightened advocacy of many social reforms. Victor Margueritte, in his Prostituee (1907)—a novel which has attracted wide attention and been translated into various languages—has sought to represent the condition of women in our actual society, and more especially the condition of the prostitute under what he regards as the odious and iniquitous system still prevailing. The book is a faithful picture of the real facts, thanks to the assistance the author received from the Paris Prefecture of Police, and largely for that reason is not altogether a satisfactory work of art, but it vividly and poignantly represents the cruelty, indifference, and hypocrisy so often shown by men towards women, and is a book which, on that account, cannot be too widely read. One of the most notable of modern plays is Brieux's Les Avaries (1902). This distinguished dramatist, himself a medical man, dedicates his play to Fournier, the greatest of syphilographers. "I think with you," he writes here, "that syphilis will lose much of its danger when it is possible to speak openly of an evil which is neither a shame nor a punishment, and when those who suffer from it, knowing what evils they may propagate, will better understand their duties towards others and towards themselves." The story developed in the drama is the old and typical story of the young man who has spent his bachelor days in what he considers a discrete and regular manner, having only had two mistresses, neither of them prostitutes, but at the end of this period, at a gay supper at which he bids farewell to his bachelor life, he commits a fatal indiscretion and becomes infected by syphilis; his marriage is approaching and he goes to a distinguished specialist who warns him that treatment takes time, and that marriage is impossible for several years; he finds a quack, however, who undertakes to cure him in six months; at the end of the time he marries; a syphilitic child is born; the wife discovers the state of things and forsakes her home to return to her parents; her indignant father, a deputy in Parliament, arrives in Paris; the last word is with the great specialist who brings finally some degree of peace and hope into the family. The chief morals Brieux points out are that it is the duty of the bride's parents before marriage to ascertain the bridegroom's health; that the bridegroom should have a doctor's certificate; that at every marriage the part of the doctors is at least as important as that of the lawyers. Even if it were a less accomplished work of art than it is, Les Avaries is a play which, from the social and educative point of view alone, all who have reached the age of adolescence should be compelled to see.

Another aspect of the same problem has been presented in Plus Fort que le Mal, a book written in dramatic form (though not as a properly constituted play intended for the stage) by a distinguished French medical author who here adopts the name of Espy de Metz. The author (who is not, however, pleading pro domo) calls for a more sympathetic attitude towards those who suffer from syphilis, and though he writes with much less dramatic skill than Brieux, and scarcely presents his moral in so unequivocal a form, his work is a notable contribution to the dramatic literature of syphilis.

It will probably be some time before these questions, poignant as they are from the dramatic point of view, and vitally important from the social point of view, are introduced on the English or the American stage. It is a remarkable fact that, notwithstanding the Puritanic elements which still exist in Anglo-Saxon thought and feeling generally, the Puritanic aspect of life has never received embodiment in the English or American drama. On the English stage it is never permitted to hint at the tragic side of wantonness; vice must always be made seductive, even though a deus ex machina causes it to collapse at the end of the performance. As Mr. Bernard Shaw has said, the English theatrical method by no means banishes vice; it merely consents that it shall be made attractive; its charms are advertised and its penalties suppressed. "Now, it is futile to plead that the stage is not the proper place for the representation and discussion of illegal operations, incest, and venereal disease. If the stage is the proper place for the exhibition and discussion of seduction, adultery, promiscuity, and prostitution, it must be thrown open to all the consequences of these things, or it will demoralize the nation."

The impulse to insist that vice shall always be made attractive is not really, notwithstanding appearances, a vicious impulse. It arises from a mental confusion, a common psychic tendency, which is by no means confined to Anglo-Saxon lands, and is even more well marked among the better educated in the merely literary sense, than among the worse educated people. The aesthetic is confused with the moral, and what arouses disgust is thus regarded as immoral. In France the novels of Zola, the most pedestrianally moralistic of writers, were for a long time supposed to be immoral because they were often disgusting. The same feeling is still more widespread in England. If a prostitute is brought on the stage, and she is pretty, well-dressed, seductive, she may gaily sail through the play and every one is satisfied. But if she were not particularly pretty, well-dressed, or seductive, if it were made plain that she was diseased and was reckless in infecting others with that disease, if it were hinted that she could on occasion be foul-mouthed, if, in short, a picture were shown from life—then we should hear that the unfortunate dramatist had committed something that was "disgusting" and "immoral." Disgusting it might be, but, on that very account, it would be moral. There is a distinction here that the psychologist cannot too often point out or the moralist too often emphasize.

It is not for the physician to complicate and confuse his own task as teacher by mixing it up with considerations which belong to the spiritual sphere. But in carrying out impartially his own special work of enlightenment he will always do well to remember that there is in the adolescent mind, as it has been necessary to point out in a previous chapter, a spontaneous force working on the side of sexual hygiene. Those who believe that the adolescent mind is merely bent on sensual indulgence are not less false and mischievous in their influence than are those who think it possible and desirable for adolescents to be preserved in sheer sexual ignorance. However concealed, suppressed, or deformed—usually by the misplaced and premature zeal of foolish parents and teachers—there arise at puberty ideal impulses which, even though they may be rooted in sex, yet in their scope transcend sex. These are capable of becoming far more potent guides of the physical sex impulse than are merely material or even hygienic considerations.

It is time to summarize and conclude this discussion of the prevention of venereal disease, which, though it may seem to the superficial observer to be merely a medical and sanitary question outside the psychologist's sphere, is yet seen on closer view to be intimately related even to the most spiritual conception of the sexual relationships. Not only are venereal diseases the foes to the finer development of the race, but we cannot attain to any wholesome and beautiful vision of the relationships of sex so long as such relationships are liable at every moment to be corrupted and undermined at their source. We cannot yet precisely measure the interval which must elapse before, so far as Europe at least is concerned, syphilis and gonorrhoea are sent to that limbo of monstrous old dead diseases to which plague and leprosy have gone and smallpox is already drawing near. But society is beginning to realize that into this field also must be brought the weapons of light and air, the sword and the breastplate with which all diseases can alone be attacked. As we have seen, there are four methods by which in the more enlightened countries venereal disease is now beginning to be combated.[255] (1) By proclaiming openly that the venereal diseases are diseases like any other disease, although more subtle and terrible than most, which may attack anyone from the unborn baby to its grandmother, and that they are not, more than other diseases, the shameful penalties of sin, from which relief is only to be sought, if at all, by stealth, but human calamities; (2) by adopting methods of securing official information concerning the extent, distribution, and variation of venereal disease, through the already recognized plan of notification and otherwise, and by providing such facilities for treatment, especially for free treatment, as may be found necessary; (3) by training the individual sense of moral responsibility, so that every member of the community may realize that to inflict a serious disease on another person, even only as a result of reckless negligence, is a more serious offence than if he or she had used the knife or the gun or poison as the method of attack, and that it is necessary to introduce special legal provision in every country to assist the recovery of damages for such injuries and to inflict penalties by loss of liberty or otherwise; (4) by the spread of hygienic knowledge, so that all adolescents, youths and girls alike, may be furnished at the outset of adult life with an equipment of information which will assist them to avoid the grosser risks of contamination and enable them to recognize and avoid danger at the earliest stages.

A few years ago, when no method of combating venereal disease was known except that system of police regulation which is now in its decadence, it would have been impossible to bring forward such considerations as these; they would have seemed Utopian. To-day they are not only recognizable as practical, but they are being actually put into practice, although, it is true, with very varying energy and insight in different countries. Yet it is certain that in the competition of nationalities, as Max von Niessen has well said, "that country will best take a leading place in the march of civilization which has the foresight and courage to introduce and carry through those practical movements of sexual hygiene which have so wide and significant a bearing on its own future, and that of the human race generally."[256]

FOOTNOTES:

[220] It is probable that Schopenhauer felt a more than merely speculative interest in this matter. Bloch has shown good reason for believing that Schopenhauer himself contracted syphilis in 1813, and that this was a factor in constituting his conception of the world and in confirming his constitutional pessimism (Medizinische Klinik, Nos. 25 and 26, 1906).

[221] Havelburg, in Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. i, pp. 186-189.

[222] This is the very definite opinion of Lowndes after an experience of fifty-four years in the treatment of venereal diseases in Liverpool (British Medical Journal, Feb. 9, 1907, p. 334). It is further indicated by the fact (if it is a real fact) that since 1876 there has been a decline of both the infantile and general mortality from syphilis in England.

[223] "There is no doubt whatever that syphilis is on the increase in London, judging from hospital work alone," says Pernet (British Medical Journal, March 30, 1907). Syphilis was evidently very prevalent, however, a century or two ago, and there is no ground for asserting positively that it is more prevalent to-day.

[224] See, e.g., A. Neisser, Die experimentelle Syphilisforschung, 1906, and E. Hoffmann (who was associated with Schaudinn's discovery), Die Aetiologie der Syphilis, 1906; D'Arcy Power, A System of Syphilis, 1908, etc.; F.W. Mott, "Pathology of Syphilis in the Light of Modern Research," British Medical Journal, February 20, 1909; also, Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, vol. iv, 1909.

[225] There is some difference of opinion on this point, and though it seems probable that early and thorough treatment usually cures the disease in a few years and renders further complications highly improbable, it is not possible, even under the most favorable circumstances, to speak with absolute certainty as to the future.

[226] "That syphilis has been, and is, one of the chief causes of physical degeneration in England cannot be denied, and it is a fact that is acknowledged on all sides," writes Lieutenant-Colonel Lambkin, the medical officer in command of the London Military Hospital for Venereal Diseases. "To grapple with the treatment of syphilis among the civil population of England ought to be the chief object of those interested in that most burning question, the physical degeneration of our race" (British Medical Journal, August 19, 1905).

[227] F.W. Mott, "Syphilis as a Cause of Insanity," British Medical Journal, October 18, 1902.

[228] It can seldom be proved in more than eighty per cent. of cases, but in twenty per cent. of old syphilitic cases it is commonly impossible to find traces of the disease or to obtain a history of it. Crocker found that it was only in eighty per cent. of cases of absolutely certain syphilitic skin diseases that he could obtain a history of syphilitic infection, and Mott found exactly the same percentage in absolutely certain syphilitic lesions of the brain; Mott believes (e.g., "Syphilis in Relation to the Nervous System," British Medical Journal, January 4, 1908) that syphilis is the essential cause of general paralysis and tabes.

[229] Audry. La Semaine Medicale, June 26, 1907. When Europeans carry syphilis to lands inhabited by people of lower race, the results are often very much worse than this. Thus Lambkin, as a result of a special mission to investigate syphilis in Uganda, found that in some districts as many as ninety per cent, of the people suffer from syphilis, and fifty to sixty per cent, of the infant mortality is due to this cause. These people are Baganda, a highly intelligent, powerful, and well-organized tribe before they received, in the gift of syphilis, the full benefit of civilization and Christianity, which (Lambkin points out) has been largely the cause of the spread of the disease by breaking down social customs and emancipating the women. Christianity is powerful enough to break down the old morality, but not powerful enough to build up a new morality (British Medical Journal, October 3, 1908, p. 1037).

[230] Even within the limits of the English army it is found In India (H.C. French, Syphilis in the Army, 1907) that venereal disease is ten times more frequent among British troops than among Native troops. Outside of national armies it is found, by admission to hospital and death rates, that the United States stands far away at the head for frequency of venereal disease, being followed by Great Britain, then France and Austria-Hungary, Russia, and Germany.

[231] There is no dispute concerning the antiquity of gonorrhoea in the Old World as there is regarding syphilis. The disease was certainly known at a very remote period. Even Esarhaddon, the famous King of Assyria, referred to in the Old Testament, was treated by the priests for a disorder which, as described in the cuneiform documents of the time, could only have been gonorrhoea. The disease was also well known to the ancient Egyptians, and evidently common, for they recorded many prescriptions for its treatment (Oefele, "Gonorrhoe 1350 vor Christi Geburt," Monatshefte fuer Praktische Dermatologie, 1899, p. 260).

[232] Cf. Memorandum by Sydney Stephenson, Report of Ophthalmia Neonatorum Committee, British Medical Journal, May 8, 1909.

[233] The extent of these evils is set forth, e.g., in a comprehensive essay by Taylor, American Journal Obstetrics, January, 1908.

[234] Neisser brings together figures bearing on the prevalence of gonorrhoea in Germany, Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, pp. 486-492.

[235] Lancet, September 23, 1882. As regards women, Dr. Frances Ivens (British Medical Journal, June 19, 1909) has found at Liverpool that 14 per cent. of gynaecological cases revealed the presence of gonorrhoea. They were mostly poor respectable married women. This is probably a high proportion, as Liverpool is a busy seaport, but it is less than Saenger's estimate of 18 per cent.

[236] E.H. Grandin, Medical Record, May 26, 1906.

[237] E.W. Cushing, "Sociological Aspects of Gonorrhoea," Transactions American Gynecological Society, vol. xxii, 1897.

[238] It is only in very small communities ruled by an autocratic power with absolute authority to control conditions and to examine persons of both sexes that reglementation becomes in any degree effectual. This is well shown by Dr. W.E. Harwood, who describes the system he organized in the mines of the Minnesota Iron Company (Journal American Medical Association, December 22, 1906). The women in the brothels on the company's estate were of the lowest class, and disease was very prevalent. Careful examination of the women was established, and control of the men, who, immediately on becoming diseased, were bound to declare by what woman they had been infected. The woman was responsible for the medical bill of the man she infected, and even for his board, if incapacitated, and the women were compelled to maintain a fund for their own hospital expenses when required. In this way venereal disease, though not entirely uprooted, was very greatly diminished.

[239] A clear and comprehensive statement of the present position of the question is given by Iwan Bloch, Das Sexualleben Unserer Zeit, Chs. XIII-XV. How ineffectual the system of police regulation is, even in Germany, where police interference is tolerated to so marked a degree, may be illustrated by the case of Mannheim. Here the regulation of prostitution is very severe and thorough, yet a careful inquiry in 1905 among the doctors of Mannheim (ninety-two of whom sent in detailed returns) showed that of six hundred cases of venereal disease in men, nearly half had been contracted from prostitutes. About half the remaining cases (nearly a quarter of the whole) were due to waitresses and bar-maids; then followed servant-girls (Lion and Loeb, in Sexualpaedagogik, the Proceedings of the Third German Congress for Combating Venereal Diseases, 1907, p. 295).

[240] A sixth less numerous class might be added of the young girls, often no more than children, who have been practically raped by men who believe that intercourse with a virgin is a cure for obstinate venereal disease. In America this belief is frequently held by Italians, Chinese, negroes, etc. W. Travis Gibb, Examining Physician of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, has examined over 900 raped children (only a small proportion, he states, of the cases actually occurring), and finds that thirteen per cent have venereal diseases. A fairly large proportion of these cases, among girls from twelve to sixteen, are, he states, willing victims. Dr. Flora Pollack, also, of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Dispensary, estimates that in Baltimore alone from 800 to 1,000 children between the ages of one and fifteen are venereally infected every year. The largest number, she finds, is at the age of six, and the chief cause appears to be, not lust, but superstition.

[241] For a discussion of inherited syphilis, see, e.g., Clement Lucas, Lancet, February 1, 1908.

[242] Much harm has been done in some countries by the foolish and mischievous practice of friendly societies and sick clubs of ignoring venereal diseases, and not according free medical aid or sick pay to those members who suffer from them. This practice prevailed, for instance, in Vienna until 1907, when a more humane and enlightened policy was inaugurated, venereal diseases being placed on the same level as other diseases.

[243] Active measures against venereal disease were introduced in Sweden early in the last century, and compulsory and gratuitous treatment established. Compulsory notification was introduced many years ago in Norway, and by 1907 there was a great diminution in the prevalence of venereal diseases; there is compulsory treatment.

[244] See, e.g., Morrow, Social Diseases and Marriage, Ch. XXXVII.

[245] A committee of the Medical Society of New York, appointed in 1902 to consider this question, reported in favor of notification without giving names and addresses, and Dr. C.R. Drysdale, who took an active part in the Brussels International Conference of 1899, advocated a similar plan in England, British Medical Journal, February 3, 1900.

[246] Thus in Munich, in 1908, a man who had given gonorrhoea to a servant-girl was sent to prison for ten months on this ground. The state of German opinion to-day on this subject is summarized by Bloch, Sexualleben unserer Zeit, p. 424.

[247] A. Despres, La Prostitution a Paris, p. 191.

[248] F. Aurientis, Etude Medico-legale sur la jurisprudence actuelle a propos de la Transmission des Maladies Veneriennes, These de Paris, 1906.

[249] In England at present "a husband knowingly and wilfully infecting his wife with the venereal disease, cannot be convicted criminally, either under a charge of assault or of inflicting grievous bodily harm" (N. Geary, The Law of Marriage, p. 479). This was decided in 1888 in the case of R. v. Clarence by nine judges to four judges in the Court for the Consideration of Crown Cases Reserved.

[250] Modern democratic sentiment is opposed to the sequestration of a prostitute merely because she is diseased. But there can be no reasonable doubt whatever that if a diseased prostitute infects another person, and is unable to pay the very heavy damages which should be demanded in such a case, she ought to be secluded and subjected to treatment. That is necessary in the interests of the community. But it is also necessary, to avoid placing a premium on the commission of an offence which would ensure gratuitous treatment and provision for a prostitute without means, that she should be furnished with facilities for treatment in any case.

[251] It has, however, been decided by the Paris Court of Appeal that for a husband to marry when knowingly suffering from a venereal disease and to communicate that disease to his wife is a sufficient cause for divorce (Semaine Medicale, May, 1896).

[252] The large volume, entitled Sexualpaedagogik, containing the Proceedings of the Third of these Congresses, almost ignores the special subject of venereal disease, and is devoted to the questions involved by the general sexual education of the young, which, as many of the speakers maintained, must begin with the child at his mother's knee.

[253] "Workmen, soldiers, and so on," Neisser remarks (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, p. 485), "can more easily find non-prostitute girls of their own class willing to enter into amorous relations with them which result in sexual intercourse, and they are therefore less exposed to the danger of infection than those men who have recourse almost exclusively to prostitutes" (see also Bloch, Sexualleben unserer Zeit, p. 437).

[254] The character and extent of such lectures are fully discussed in the Proceedings of the Third Congress of the German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases, Sexualpaedagogik, 1907.

[255] I leave out of account, as beyond the scope of the present work, the auxiliary aids to the suppression of venereal diseases furnished by the promising new methods, only now beginning to be understood, of treating or even aborting such diseases (see, e.g., Metchnikoff, The New Hygiene, 1906).

[256] Max von Niessen, "Herr Doktor, darf ich heiraten?" Mutterschutz, 1906, p. 352.



CHAPTER IX.

SEXUAL MORALITY.

Prostitution in Relation to Our Marriage System—Marriage and Morality—The Definition of the Term "Morality"—Theoretical Morality—Its Division Into Traditional Morality and Ideal Morality—Practical Morality—Practical Morality Based on Custom—The Only Subject of Scientific Ethics—The Reaction Between Theoretical and Practical Morality—Sexual Morality in the Past an Application of Economic Morality—The Combined Rigidity and Laxity of This Morality—The Growth of a Specific Sexual Morality and the Evolution of Moral Ideals—Manifestations of Sexual Morality—Disregard of the Forms of Marriage—Trial Marriage—Marriage After Conception of Child—Phenomena in Germany, Anglo-Saxon Countries, Russia, etc.—The Status of Woman—The Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Equality of Women with Men—The Theory of the Matriarchate—Mother-Descent—Women in Babylonia—Egypt—Rome—The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries—The Historical Tendency Favoring Moral Inequality of Woman—The Ambiguous Influence of Christianity—Influence of Teutonic Custom and Feudalism—Chivalry—Woman in England—The Sale of Wives—The Vanishing Subjection of Woman—Inaptitude of the Modern Man to Domineer—The Growth of Moral Responsibility in Women—The Concomitant Development of Economic Independence—The Increase of Women Who Work—Invasion of the Modern Industrial Field by Women—In How Far This Is Socially Justifiable—The Sexual Responsibility of Women and Its Consequences—The Alleged Moral Inferiority of Women—The "Self-Sacrifice" of Women—Society Not Concerned with Sexual Relationships—Procreation the Sole Sexual Concern of the State—The Supreme Importance of Maternity.

It has been necessary to deal fully with the phenomena of prostitution because, however aloof we may personally choose to hold ourselves from those phenomena, they really bring us to the heart of the sexual question in so far as it constitutes a social problem. If we look at prostitution from the outside, as an objective phenomenon, as a question of social dynamics, it is seen to be not a merely accidental and eliminable incident of our present marriage system but an integral part of it, without which it would fall to pieces. This will probably be fairly clear to all who have followed the preceding exposition of prostitutional phenomena. There is, however, more than this to be said. Not only is prostitution to-day, as it has been for more than two thousand years, the buttress of our marriage system, but if we look at marriage, not from the outside as a formal institution, but from the inside with relation to the motives that constitute it, we find that marriage in a large proportion of cases is itself in certain respects a form of prostitution. This has been emphasized so often and from so many widely different standpoints that it may seem hardly necessary to labor the point here. But the point is one of extreme importance in relation to the question of sexual morality. Our social conditions are unfavorable to the development of a high moral feeling in woman. The difference between the woman who sells herself in prostitution and the woman who sells herself in marriage, according to the saying of Marro already quoted, "is only a difference in price and duration of the contract." Or, as Forel puts it, marriage is "a more fashionable form of prostitution," that is to say, a mode of obtaining, or disposing of, for monetary considerations, a sexual commodity. Marriage is, indeed, not merely a more fashionable form of prostitution, it is a form sanctified by law and religion, and the question of morality is not allowed to intrude. Morality may be outraged with impunity provided that law and religion have been invoked. The essential principle of prostitution is thus legalized and sanctified among us. That is why it is so difficult to arouse any serious indignation, or to maintain any reasoned objections, against our prostitution considered by itself. The most plausible ground is that of those[257] who, bringing marriage down to the level of prostitution, maintain that the prostitute is a "blackleg" who is accepting less than the "market rate of wages," i.e., marriage, for the sexual services she renders. But even this low ground is quite unsafe. The prostitute is really paid extremely well considering how little she gives in return; the wife is really paid extremely badly considering how much she often gives, and how much she necessarily gives up. For the sake of the advantage of economic dependence on her husband, she must give up, as Ellen Key observes, those rights over her children, her property, her work, and her own person which she enjoys as an unmarried woman, even, it may be added, as a prostitute. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, as the wife is compelled to do; the prostitute, unlike the wife, retains her freedom and her personal rights, although these may not often be of much worth. It is the wife rather than the prostitute who is the "blackleg."

It is by no means only during recent years that our marriage system has been arraigned before the bar of morals. Forty years ago James Hinton exhausted the vocabulary of denunciation in describing the immorality and selfish licentiousness which our marriage system covers with the cloak of legality and sanctity. "There is an unsoundness in our marriage relations," Hinton wrote. "Not only practically are they dreadful, but they do not answer to feelings and convictions far too widespread to be wisely ignored. Take the case of women of marked eminence consenting to be a married man's mistress; of pure and simple girls saying they cannot see why they should have a marriage by law; of a lady saying that if she were in love she would not have any legal tie; of its being necessary—or thought so by good and wise men—to keep one sex in bitter and often fatal ignorance. These things (and how many more) show some deep unsoundness in the marriage relations. This must be probed and searched to the bottom."

At an earlier date, in 1847, Gross-Hoffinger, in his Die Schicksale der Frauen und die Prostitution—a remarkable book which Bloch, with little exaggeration, describes as possessing an epoch-marking significance—vigorously showed that the problem of prostitution is in reality the problem of marriage, and that we can only reform away prostitution by reforming marriage, regarded as a compulsory institution resting on an antiquated economic basis. Gross-Hoffinger was a pioneering precursor of Ellen Key.

More than a century and a half earlier a man of very different type scathingly analyzed the morality of his time, with a brutal frankness, indeed, that seemed to his contemporaries a revoltingly cynical attitude towards their sacred institutions, and they felt that nothing was left to them save to burn his books. Describing modern marriage in his Fable of the Bees (1714, p. 64), and what that marriage might legally cover, Mandeville wrote: "The fine gentleman I spoke of need not practice any greater self-denial than the savage, and the latter acted more according to the laws of nature and sincerity than the first. The man that gratifies his appetite after the manner the custom of the country allows of, has no censure to fear. If he is hotter than goats or bulls, as soon as the ceremony is over, let him sate and fatigue himself with joy and ecstasies of pleasure, raise and indulge his appetite by turns, as extravagantly as his strength and manhood will give him leave. He may, with safety, laugh at the wise men that should reprove him: all the women and above nine in ten of the men are of his side; nay, he has the liberty of valuing himself upon the fury of his unbridled passions, and the more he wallows in lust and strains every faculty to be abandonedly voluptuous, the sooner he shall have the good-will and gain the affection of the women, not the young, vain, and lascivious only, but the prudent, grave, and most sober matrons."

Thus the charge brought against our marriage system from the point of view of morality is that it subordinates the sexual relationship to considerations of money and of lust. That is precisely the essence of prostitution.

The only legitimately moral end of marriage—whether we regard it from the wider biological standpoint or from the narrower standpoint of human society—is as a sexual selection, effected in accordance with the laws of sexual selection, and having as its direct object a united life of complete mutual love and as its indirect object the procreation of the race. Unless procreation forms part of the object of marriage, society has nothing whatever to do with it and has no right to make its voice heard. But if procreation is one of the ends of marriage, then it is imperative from the biological and social points of view that no influences outside the proper natural influence of sexual selection should be permitted to affect the choice of conjugal partners, for in so far as wholesome sexual selection is interfered with the offspring is likely to be injured and the interests of the race affected.

It must, of course, be clearly understood that the idea of marriage as a form of sexual union based not on biological but on economic considerations, is very ancient, and is sometimes found in societies that are almost primitive. Whenever, however, marriage on a purely property basis, and without due regard to sexual selection, has occurred among comparatively primitive and vigorous peoples, it has been largely deprived of its evil results by the recognition of its merely economic character, and by the absence of any desire to suppress, even nominally, other sexual relationships on a more natural basis which were outside this artificial form of marriage. Polygamy especially tended to conciliate unions on an economic basis with unions on a natural sexual basis. Our modern marriage system has, however, acquired an artificial rigidity which excludes the possibility of this natural safeguard and compensation. Whatever its real moral content may be, a modern marriage is always "legal" and "sacred." We are indeed so accustomed to economic forms of marriage that, as Sidgwick truly observed (Method of Ethics, Bk. ii, Ch. XI), when they are spoken of as "legalized prostitution" it constantly happens that "the phrase is felt to be extravagant and paradoxical."

A man who marries for money or for ambition is departing from the biological and moral ends of marriage. A woman who sells herself for life is morally on the same level as one who sells herself for a night. The fact that the payment seems larger, that in return for rendering certain domestic services and certain personal complacencies—services and complacencies in which she may be quite inexpert—she will secure an almshouse in which she will be fed and clothed and sheltered for life makes no difference in the moral aspect of her case. The moral responsibility is, it need scarcely be said, at least as much the man's as the woman's. It is largely due to the ignorance and even the indifference of men, who often know little or nothing of the nature of women and the art of love. The unintelligence with which even men who might, one thinks, be not without experience, select as a mate, a woman who, however fine and charming she may be, possesses none of the qualities which her wooer really craves, is a perpetual marvel. To refrain from testing and proving the temper and quality of the woman he desires for a mate is no doubt an amiable trait of humility on a man's part. But it is certain that a man should never be content with less than the best of what a woman's soul and body have to give, however unworthy he may feel himself of such a possession. This demand, it must be remarked, is in the highest interests of the woman herself. A woman can offer to a man what is a part at all events of the secret of the universe. The woman degrades herself who sinks to the level of a candidate for an asylum for the destitute.

Our discussion of the psychic facts of sex has thus, it will be seen, brought us up to the question of morality. Over and over again, in setting forth the phenomena of prostitution, it has been necessary to use the word "moral." That word, however, is vague and even, it may be, misleading because it has several senses. So far, it has been left to the intelligent reader, as he will not fail to perceive, to decide from the context in what sense the word was used. But at the present point, before we proceed to discuss sexual psychology in relation to marriage, it is necessary, in order to avoid ambiguity, to remind the reader what precisely are the chief main senses in which the word "morality" is commonly used.

The morality with which ethical treatises are concerned is theoretical morality. It is concerned with what people "ought"—or what is "right" for them—to do. Socrates in the Platonic dialogues was concerned with such theoretical morality: what "ought" people to seek in their actions? The great bulk of ethical literature, until recent times one may say the whole of it, is concerned with that question. Such theoretical morality is, as Sidgwick said, a study rather than a science, for science can only be based on what is, not on what ought to be.

Even within the sphere of theoretical morality there are two very different kinds of morality, so different indeed that sometimes each regards the other as even inimical or at best only by courtesy, with yet a shade of contempt, "moral." These two kinds of theoretical morality are traditional morality and ideal morality. Traditional morality is founded on the long established practices of a community and possesses the stability of all theoretical ideas based in the past social life and surrounding every individual born into the community from his earliest years. It becomes the voice of conscience which speaks automatically in favor of all the rules that are thus firmly fixed, even when the individual himself no longer accepts them. Many persons, for example, who were brought up in childhood to the Puritanical observance of Sunday, will recall how, long after they had ceased to believe that such observances were "right," they yet in the violation of them heard the protest of the automatically aroused voice of "conscience," that is to say the expression within the individual of customary rules which have indeed now ceased to be his own but were those of the community in which he was brought up.

Ideal morality, on the other hand, refers not to the past of the community but to its future. It is based not on the old social actions that are becoming antiquated, and perhaps even anti-social in their tendency, but on new social actions that are as yet only practiced by a small though growing minority of the community. Nietzsche in modern times has been a conspicuous champion of ideal morality, the heroic morality of the pioneer, of the individual of the coming community, against traditional morality, or, as he called it, herd-morality, the morality of the crowd. These two moralities are necessarily opposed to each other, but, we have to remember, they are both equally sound and equally indispensable, not only to those who accept them but to the community which they both contribute to hold in vital theoretical balance. We have seen them both, for instance, applied to the question of prostitution; traditional morality defends prostitution, not for its own sake, but for the sake of the marriage system which it regards as sufficiently precious to be worth a sacrifice, while ideal morality refuses to accept the necessity of prostitution, and looks forward to progressive changes in the marriage system which will modify and diminish prostitution.

But altogether outside theoretical morality, or the question of what people "ought" to do, there remains practical morality, or the question of what, as a matter of fact, people actually do. This is the really fundamental and essential morality. Latin mores and Greek aethos both refer to custom, to the things that are, and not to the things that "ought" to be, except in the indirect and secondary sense that whatever the members of the community, in the mass, actually do, is the thing that they feel they ought to do. In the first place, however, a moral act was not done because it was felt that it ought to be done, but for reasons of a much deeper and more instinctive character.[258] It was not first done because it was felt it ought to be done, but it was felt it "ought" to be done because it had actually become the custom to do it.

The actions of a community are determined by the vital needs of a community under the special circumstances of its culture, time, and land. When it is the general custom for children to kill their aged parents that custom is always found to be the best not only for the community but even for the old people themselves, who desire it; the action is both practically moral and theoretically moral.[259] And when, as among ourselves, the aged are kept alive, that action is also both practically and theoretically moral; it is in no wise dependent on any law or rule opposed to the taking of life, for we glory in the taking of life under the patriotic name of "war," and are fairly indifferent to it when involved by the demands of our industrial system; but the killing of the aged no longer subserves any social need and their preservation ministers to our civilized emotional needs. The killing of a man is indeed notoriously an act which differs widely in its moral value at different periods and in different countries. It was quite moral in England two centuries ago and less, to kill a man for trifling offences against property, for such punishment commended itself as desirable to the general sense of the educated community. To-day it would be regarded as highly immoral. We are even yet only beginning to doubt the morality of condemning to death and imprisoning for life an unmarried girl who destroyed her infant at birth, solely actuated, against all her natural impulses, by the primitive instinct of self-defense. It cannot be said that we have yet begun to doubt the morality of killing men in war, though we no longer approve of killing women and children, or even non-combatants generally. Every age or land has its own morality.

"Custom, in the strict sense of the word," well says Westermarck, "involves a moral rule.... Society is the school in which men learn to distinguish between right and wrong. The headmaster is custom."[260] Custom is not only the basis of morality but also of law. "Custom is law."[261] The field of theoretical morality has been found so fascinating a playground for clever philosophers that there has sometimes been a danger of forgetting that, after all, it is not theoretical morality but practical morality, the question of what men in the mass of a community actually do, which constitutes the real stuff of morals.[262] If we define more precisely what we mean by morals, on the practical side, we may say that it is constituted by those customs which the great majority of the members of a community regard as conducive to the welfare of the community at some particular time and place. It is for this reason—i.e., because it is a question of what is and not of merely what some think ought to be—that practical morals form the proper subject of science. "If the word 'ethics' is to be used as the name for a science," Westermarck says, "the object of that science can only be to study the moral consciousness as a fact."[263]

Lecky's History of European Morals is a study in practical rather than in theoretical morals. Dr. Westermarck's great work, The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, is a more modern example of the objectively scientific discussion of morals, although this is not perhaps clearly brought out by the title. It is essentially a description of the actual historical facts of what has been, and not of what "ought" to be. Mr. L.T. Hobhouse's Morals in Evolution, published almost at the same time, is similarly a work which, while professedly dealing with ideas, i.e., with rules and regulations, and indeed disclaiming the task of being "the history of conduct," yet limits itself to those rules which are "in fact, the normal conduct of the average man" (vol. i, p. 26). In other words, it is essentially a history of practical morality, and not of theoretical morality. One of the most subtle and suggestive of living thinkers, M. Jules de Gaultier, in several of his books, and notably in La Dependance de la Morale et l'Independance des Moeurs (1907), has analyzed the conception of morals in a somewhat similar sense. "Phenomena relative to conduct," as he puts it (op. cit., p. 58), "are given in experience like other phenomena, so that morality, or the totality of the laws which at any given moment of historic evolution are applied to human practice, is dependent on customs." I may also refer to the masterly exposition of this aspect of morality in Levy-Bruhl's La Morale et la Science des Moeurs (there is an English translation).

Practical morality is thus the solid natural fact which forms the biological basis of theoretical morality, whether traditional or ideal. The excessive fear, so widespread among us, lest we should injure morality is misplaced. We cannot hurt morals though we can hurt ourselves. Morals is based on nature and can at the most only be modified. As Crawley rightly insists,[264] even the categorical imperatives of our moral traditions, so far from being, as is often popularly supposed, attempts to suppress Nature, arise in the desire to assist Nature; they are simply an attempt at the rigid formulation of natural impulses. The evil of them only lies in the fact that, like all things that become rigid and dead, they tend to persist beyond the period when they were a beneficial vital reaction to the environment. They thus provoke new forms of ideal morality; and practical morals develops new structures, in accordance with new vital relationships, to replace older and desiccated traditions.

There is clearly an intimate relationship between theoretical morals and practical morals or morality proper. For not only is theoretical morality the outcome in consciousness of realized practices embodied in the general life of the community, but, having thus become conscious, it reacts on those practices and tends to support them or, by its own spontaneous growth, to modify them. This action is diverse, according as we are dealing with one or the other of the strongly marked divisions of theoretical morality: traditional and posterior morality, retarding the vital growth of moral practice, or ideal and anterior morality, stimulating the vital growth of moral practice. Practical morality, or morals proper, may be said to stand between these two divisions of theoretical morality. Practice is perpetually following after anterior theoretical morality, in so far of course as ideal morality really is anterior and not, as so often happens, astray up a blind alley. Posterior or traditional morality always follows after practice. The result is that while the actual morality, in practice at any time or place, is always closely related to theoretical morality, it can never exactly correspond to either of its forms. It always fails to catch up with ideal morality; it is always outgrowing traditional morality.

It has been necessary at this point to formulate definitely the three chief forms in which the word "moral" is used, although under one shape or another they cannot but be familiar to the reader. In the discussion of prostitution it has indeed been easily possible to follow the usual custom of allowing the special sense in which the word was used to be determined by the context. But now, when we are, for the moment, directly concerned with the specific question of the evolution of sexual morality, it is necessary to be more precise in formulating the terms we use. In this chapter, except when it is otherwise stated, we are concerned primarily with morals proper, with actual conduct as it develops among the masses of a community, and only secondarily with anterior morality or with posterior morality.

Sexual morality, like all other kinds of morality, is necessarily constituted by inherited traditions modified by new adaptations to the changing social environment. If the influence of tradition becomes unduly pronounced the moral life tends to decay and lose its vital adaptability. If adaptability becomes too facile the moral life tends to become unstable and to lose authority. It is only by a reasonable synthesis of structure and function—of what is called the traditional with what is called the ideal—that the moral life can retain its authority without losing its reality. Many, even among those who call themselves moralists, have found this hard to understand. In a vain desire for an impossible logicality they have over-emphasized either the ideal influence on practical morals or, still more frequently, the traditional influence, which has appealed to them because of the impressive authority its dicta seem to convey. The results in the sphere we are here concerned with have often been unfortunate, for no social impulse is so rebellious to decayed traditions, so volcanically eruptive, as that of sex.

We are accustomed to identify our present marriage system with "morality" in the abstract, and for many people, perhaps for most, it is difficult to realize that the slow and insensible movement which is always affecting social life at the present time, as at every other time, is profoundly affecting our sexual morality. A transference of values is constantly taking place; what was once the very standard of morality becomes immoral, what was once without question immoral becomes a new standard. Such a process is almost as bewildering as for the European world two thousand years ago was the great struggle between the Roman city and the Christian Church, when it became necessary to realize that what Marcus Aurelius, the great pattern of morality, had sought to crush as without question immoral,[265] was becoming regarded as the supreme standard of morality. The classic world considered love and pity and self-sacrifice as little better than weakness and sometimes worse; the Christian world not only regarded them as moralities but incarnated them in a god. Our sexual morality has likewise disregarded natural human emotions, and is incapable of understanding those who declare that to retain unduly traditional laws that are opposed to the vital needs of human societies is not a morality but an immorality.

The reason why the gradual evolution of moral ideals, which is always taking place, tends in the sexual sphere, at all events among ourselves, to reach a stage in which there seems to be an opposition between different standards lies in the fact that as yet we really have no specific sexual morality at all.[266] That may seem surprising at first to one who reflects on the immense weight which is usually attached to "sexual morality." And it is undoubtedly true that we have a morality which we apply to the sphere of sex. But that morality is one which belongs mainly to the sphere of property and was very largely developed on a property basis. All the historians of morals in general, and of marriage in particular, have set forth this fact, and illustrated it with a wealth of historical material. We have as yet no generally recognized sexual morality which has been based on the specific sexual facts of life. That becomes clear at once when we realize the central fact that the sexual relationship is based on love, at the very least on sexual desire, and that that basis is so deep as to be even physiological, for in the absence of such sexual desire it is physiologically impossible for a man to effect intercourse with a woman. Any specific sexual morality must be based on that fact. But our so-called "sexual morality," so far from being based on that fact, attempts to ignore it altogether. It makes contracts, it arranges sexual relationships beforehand, it offers to guarantee permanency of sexual inclinations. It introduces, that is, considerations of a kind that is perfectly sound in the economic sphere to which such considerations rightly belong, but ridiculously incongruous in the sphere of sex to which they have solemnly been applied. The economic relationships of life, in the large sense, are, as we shall see, extremely important in the evolution of any sound sexual morality, but they belong to the conditions of its development and do not constitute its basis.[267]

The fact that, from the legal point of view, marriage is primarily an arrangement for securing the rights of property and inheritance is well illustrated by the English divorce law to-day. According to this law, if a woman has sexual intercourse with any man beside her husband, he is entitled to divorce her; if, however, the husband has intercourse with another woman beside his wife, she is not entitled to a divorce; that is only accorded if, in addition, he has also been cruel to her, or deserted her, and from any standpoint of ideal morality such a law is obviously unjust, and it has now been discarded in nearly all civilized lands except England.

But from the standpoint of property and inheritance it is quite intelligible, and on that ground it is still supported by the majority of Englishmen. If the wife has intercourse with other men there is a risk that the husband's property will be inherited by a child who is not his own. But the sexual intercourse of the husband with other women is followed by no such risk. The infidelity of the wife is a serious offence against property; the infidelity of the husband is no offence against property, and cannot possibly, therefore, be regarded as a ground for divorce from our legal point of view. The fact that his adultery complicated by cruelty is such a ground, is simply a concession to modern feeling. Yet, as Helena Stoecker truly points out ("Verschiedenheit im Liebesleben des Weibes und des Mannes," Zeitschrift fuer Sexualwissenschaft, Dec., 1908), a married man who has an unacknowledged child with a woman outside of marriage, has committed an act as seriously anti-social as a married woman who has a child without acknowledging that the father is not her husband. In the first case, the husband, and in the second case, the wife, have placed an undue amount of responsibility on another person. (The same point is brought forward by the author of The Question of English Divorce, p. 56.)

I insist here on the economic element in our sexual morality, because that is the element which has given it a kind of stability and become established in law. But if we take a wider view of our sexual morality, we cannot ignore the ancient element of asceticism, which has given religious passion and sanction to it. Our sexual morality is thus, in reality, a bastard born of the union of property-morality with primitive ascetic morality, neither in true relationship to the vital facts of the sexual life. It is, indeed, the property element which, with a few inconsistencies, has become finally the main concern of our law, but the ascetic element (with, in the past, a wavering relationship to law) has had an important part in moulding popular sentiment and in creating an attitude of reprobation towards sexual intercourse per se, although such intercourse is regarded as an essential part of the property-based and religiously sanctified institution of legal marriage.

The glorification of virginity led by imperceptible stages to the formulation of "fornication" as a deadly sin, and finally as an actual secular "crime." It is sometimes stated that it was not until the Council of Trent that the Church formally anathematized those who held that the state of marriage was higher than that of virginity, but the opinion had been more or less formally held from almost the earliest ages of Christianity, and is clear in the epistles of Paul. All the theologians agree that fornication is a mortal sin. Caramuel, indeed, the distinguished Spanish theologian, who made unusual concessions to the demands of reason and nature, held that fornication is only evil because it is forbidden, but Innocent XI formally condemned that proposition. Fornication as a mortal sin became gradually secularized into fornication as a crime. Fornication was a crime in France even as late as the eighteenth century, as Tarde found in his historical investigations of criminal procedure in Perigord; adultery was also a crime and severely punished quite independently of any complaint from either of the parties (Tarde, "Archeologie Criminelle en Perigord," Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, Nov. 15, 1898).

The Puritans of the Commonwealth days in England (like the Puritans of Geneva) followed the Catholic example and adopted ecclesiastical offences against chastity into the secular law. By an Act passed in 1653 fornication became punishable by three months' imprisonment inflicted on both parties. By the same Act the adultery of a wife (nothing is said of a husband) was made felony, both for her and her partner in guilt, and therefore punishable by death (Scobell, Acts and Ordinances, p. 121).

The action of a pseudo-morality, such as our sexual morality has been, is double-edged. On the one side it induces a secret and shamefaced laxity, on the other it upholds a rigid and uninspiring theoretical code which so few can consistently follow that theoretical morality is thereby degraded into a more or less empty form. "The human race would gain much," said the wise Senancour, "if virtue were made less laborious. The merit would not be so great, but what is the use of an elevation which can rarely be sustained?"[268] At present, as a more recent moralist, Ellen Key, puts it, we only have an immorality which favors vice and makes virtue irrealizable, and, as she exclaims with pardonable extravagance, to preach a sounder morality to the young, without at the same time condemning the society which encourages the prevailing immorality, is "worse than folly, it is crime."

It is on the lines along which Senancour a century ago and Ellen Key to-day are great pioneers that the new forms of anterior or ideal theoretical morality are now moving, in advance, according to the general tendency in morals, of traditional morality and even of practice.

There is one great modern movement of a definite kind which will serve to show how clearly sexual morality is to-day moving towards a new standpoint. This is the changing attitude of the bulk of the community towards both State marriage and religious marriage, and the growing tendency to disallow State interference with sexual relationships, apart from the production of children.

There has no doubt always been a tendency among the masses of the population in Europe to dispense with the official sanction of sexual relationships until such relationships have been well established and the hope of offspring has become justifiable. This tendency has been crystallized into recognized customs among numberless rural communities little touched either by the disturbing influences of the outside world or the controlling influences of theological Christian conceptions. But at the present day this tendency is not confined to the more primitive and isolated communities of Europe among whom, on the contrary, it has tended to die out. It is an unquestionable fact, says Professor Bruno Meyer, that far more than the half of sexual intercourse now takes place outside legal marriage.[269] It is among the intelligent classes and in prosperous and progressive communities that this movement is chiefly marked. We see throughout the world the practical common sense of the people shaping itself in the direction which has been pioneered by the ideal moralists who invariably precede the new growth of practical morality.

The voluntary childless marriages of to-day have served to show the possibility of such unions outside legal marriage, and such free unions are becoming, as Mrs. Parsons points out, "a progressive substitute for marriage."[270] The gradual but steady rise in the age for entering on legal marriage also points in the same direction, though it indicates not merely an increase of free unions but an increase of all forms of normal and abnormal sexuality outside marriage. Thus in England and Wales, in 1906, only 43 per 1,000 husbands and 146 per 1,000 wives were under age, while the average age for husbands was 28.6 years and for wives 26.4 years. For men the age has gone up some eight months during the past forty years, for women more than this. In the large cities, like London, where the possibilities of extra-matrimonial relationships are greater, the age for legal marriage is higher than in the country.