these suffer as the involuntary result of the voluntary act of gratifying some fundamental human instinct—­the instinct of activity, the instinct of nutrition, the instinct of affection.  The instinct of sex is as fundamental as any of these, and the involuntary evils which may follow the voluntary act of gratifying it stand on exactly the same level.  This is the essential fact:  a human being in following the human instincts implanted within him has stumbled and fallen.  Any person who sees, not this essential fact but merely some subsidiary aspect of it, reveals a mind that is twisted and perverted; he has no claim to arrest our attention.

But even if we were to adopt the standpoint of the would-be moralist, and to agree that everyone must be left to suffer his deserts, it is far indeed from being the fact that all those who contract venereal diseases are in any sense receiving their deserts.  In a large number of cases the disease has been inflicted on them in the most absolutely involuntary manner.  This is, of course, true in the case of the vast number of infants who are infected at conception or at birth.  But it is also true in a scarcely less absolute manner of a large proportion of persons infected in later life.

Syphilis insontium, or syphilis of the innocent, as it is commonly called, may be said to fall into five groups:  (1) the vast army of congenitally syphilitic infants who inherit the disease from father or mother; (2) the constantly occurring cases of syphilis contracted, in the course of their professional duties, by doctors, midwives and wet-nurses; (3) infection as a result of affection, as in simple kissing; (4) accidental infection from casual contacts and from using in common the objects and utensils of daily life, such as cups, towels, razors, knives (as in ritual circumcision), etc; (5) the infection of wives by their husbands.[240]

Hereditary congenital syphilis belongs to the ordinary pathology of the disease and is a chief element in its social danger since it is responsible for an enormous infantile mortality.[241] The risks of extragenital infection in the professional activity of doctors, midwives and wet-nurses is also universally recognized.  In the case of wet-nurses infected by their employers’ syphilitic infants at their breast, the penalty inflicted on the innocent is peculiarly harsh and unnecessary.  The influence of infected low-class midwives is notably dangerous, for they may inflict widespread injury in ignorance; thus the case has been recorded of a midwife, whose finger became infected in the course of her duties, and directly or indirectly contaminated one hundred persons.  Kissing is an extremely common source of syphilitic infection, and of all extragenital regions the mouth is by far the most frequent seat of primary syphilitic sores.  In some cases, it is true, especially in prostitutes, this is the result of abnormal sexual contacts.  But in the majority of cases it is the result of ordinary and