among adult males as from 75 to 80 per cent.; Tenney places it much lower, 20 per cent. for males and 5 per cent. for females.  In England, a writer in the Lancet, some years ago,[235] found as the result of experience and inquiries that 75 per cent. adult males have had gonorrhoea once, 40 per cent. twice, 15 per cent. three or more times.  According to Dulberg about twenty per cent. of new cases occur in married men of good social class, the disease being comparatively rare among married men of the working class in England.

Gonorrhoea in its prevalence is thus only second to measles and in the gravity of its results scarcely second to tuberculosis.  “And yet,” as Grandin remarks in comparing gonorrhoea to tuberculosis, “witness the activity of the crusade against the latter and the criminal apathy displayed when the former is concerned."[236] The public must learn to understand, another writer remarks, that “gonorrhoea is a pest that concerns its highest interests and most sacred relations as much as do smallpox, cholera, diphtheria, or tuberculosis."[237]

It cannot fairly be said that no attempts have been made to beat back the flood of venereal disease.  On the contrary, such attempts have been made from the first.  But they have never been effectual;[238] they have never been modified to changed condition; at the present day they are hopelessly unscientific and entirely opposed alike to the social and the individual demands of modern peoples.  At the various conferences on this question which have been held during recent years the only generally accepted conclusion which has emerged is that all the existing systems of interference or non-interference with prostitution are unsatisfactory.[239]

The character of prostitution has changed and the methods of dealing with it must change.  Brothels, and the systems of official regulation which grew up with special reference to brothels, are alike out of date; they have about them a mediaeval atmosphere, an antiquated spirit, which now render them unattractive and suspected.  The conspicuously distinctive brothel is falling into disrepute; the liveried prostitute absolutely under municipal control can scarcely be said to exist.  Prostitution tends to become more diffused, more intimately mingled with social life generally, less easily distinguished as a definitely separable part of life.  We can nowadays only influence it by methods of permeation which bear upon the whole of our social life.

The objection to the regulation of prostitution is still of slow growth, but it is steadily developing everywhere, and may be traced equally in scientific opinion and in popular feeling.  In France the municipalities of some of the largest cities have either suppressed the system of regulation entirely or shown their disapproval of it, while an inquiry among several hundred medical men showed that less than one-third were in favor of maintaining regulation (Die Neue Generation, June, 1909,