husbands who infect their wives contracted the disease before marriage.  They entered on marriage believing that their disease was cured, and that they had broken with their past.  Doctors have sometimes (and quacks frequently) contributed to this result by too sanguine an estimate of the period necessary to destroy the poison.  So great an authority as Fournier formerly believed that the syphilitic could safely be allowed to marry three or four years after the date of infection, but now, with increased experience, he extends the period to four or five years.  It is undoubtedly true that, especially when treatment has been thorough and prompt, the diseased constitution, in a majority of cases, can be brought under complete control in a shorter period than this, but there is always a certain proportion of cases in which the powers of infection persist for many years, and even when the syphilitic husband is no longer capable of infecting his wife he may still perhaps be in a condition to effect a disastrous influence on the offspring.

In nearly all these cases there was more or less ignorance—­which is but another word for innocence as we commonly understand innocence—­and when at last, after the event, the facts are more or less bluntly explained to the victim he frequently exclaims:  “Nobody told me!” It is this fact which condemns the pseudo-moralist.  If he had seen to it that mothers began to explain the facts of sex to their little boys and girls from childhood, if he had (as Dr. Joseph Price urges) taught the risks of venereal disease in the Sunday-school, if he had plainly preached on the relations of the sexes from the pulpit, if he had seen to it that every youth at the beginning of adolescence received some simple technical instruction from his family doctor concerning sexual health and sexual disease—­then, though there would still remain the need of pity for those who strayed from a path that must always be difficult to walk in, the would-be moralist at all events would in some measure be exculpated.  But he has seldom indeed lifted a finger to do any of these things.

Even those who may be unwilling to abandon an attitude of private moral intolerance towards the victims of venereal diseases may still do well to remember that since the public manifestation of their intolerance is mischievous, and at the best useless, it is necessary for them to restrain it in the interests of society.  They would not be the less free to order their own personal conduct in the strictest accordance with their superior moral rigidity; and that after all is for them the main thing.  But for the sake of society it is necessary for them to adopt what they may consider the convention of a purely hygienic attitude towards these diseases.  The erring are inevitably frightened by an attitude of moral reprobation into methods of concealment, and these produce an endless chain of social evils which can only be dissipated by openness.  As Duclaux has so earnestly insisted, it is impossible