is extremely extensive.  There is a bibliography at the end of Duncan Bulkley’s Syphilis in the Innocent, and a comprehensive summary of the question in a Leipzig Inaugural Dissertation by F. Moses, Zur Kasuistik der Extragenitalen Syphilis-infektion, 1904.

Even, however, when we have put aside the vast number of venereally infected people who may be said to be, in the narrowest and most conventionally moral sense, “innocent” victims of the diseases they have contracted, there is still much to be said on this question.  It must be remembered that the majority of those who contract venereal diseases by illegitimate sexual intercourse are young.  They are youths, ignorant of life, scarcely yet escaped from home, still undeveloped, incompletely educated, and easily duped by women; in many cases they have met, as they thought, a “nice” girl, not indeed strictly virtuous but, it seemed to them, above all suspicion of disease, though in reality she was a clandestine prostitute.  Or they are young girls who have indeed ceased to be absolutely chaste, but have not yet lost all their innocence, and who do not consider themselves, and are not by others considered, prostitutes; that indeed, is one of the rocks on which the system of police regulation of prostitution comes to grief, for the police cannot catch the prostitute at a sufficiently early stage.  Of women who become syphilitic, according to Fournier, twenty per cent. are infected before they are nineteen; in hospitals the proportion is as high as forty per cent.; and of men fifteen per cent. cases occur between eleven and twenty-one years of age.  The age of maximum frequency of infection is for women twenty years (in the rural population eighteen), and for men twenty-three years.  In Germany Erb finds that as many as eighty-five per cent men with gonorrhoea contracted the disease between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, a very small percentage being infected after thirty.  These young things for the most part fell into a trap which Nature had baited with her most fascinating lure; they were usually ignorant; not seldom they were deceived by an attractive personality; often they were overcome by passion; frequently all prudence and reserve had been lost in the fumes of wine.  From a truly moral point of view they were scarcely less innocent than children.

“I ask,” says Duclaux, “whether when a young man, or a young girl, abandon themselves to a dangerous caress society has done what it can to warn them.  Perhaps its intentions were good, but when the need came for precise knowledge a silly prudery has held it back, and it has left its children without viaticum....  I will go further, and proclaim that in a large number of cases the husbands who contaminate their wives are innocent.  No one is responsible for the evil which he commits without knowing it and without willing it.”  I may recall the suggestive fact, already referred to, that the majority of