to grapple successfully with venereal disease unless we consent not to introduce our prejudices, or even our morals and religion, into the question, but treat it purely and simply as a sanitary question.  And if the pseudo-moralist still has difficulty in cooeperating towards the healing of this social sore he may be reminded that he himself—­like every one of us little though we may know it—­has certainly had a great army of syphilitic and gonorrhoeal persons among his own ancestors during the past four centuries.  We are all bound together, and it is absurd, even when it is not inhuman, to cast contempt on our own flesh and blood.

I have discussed rather fully the attitude of those who plead morality as a reason for ignoring the social necessity of combating venereal disease, because although there may not be many who seriously and understandingly adopt so anti-social and inhuman an attitude there are certainly many who are glad at need of the existence of so fine an excuse for their moral indifference or their mental indolence.[242] When they are confronted by this great and difficult problem they find it easy to offer the remedy of conventional morality, although they are well aware that on a large scale that remedy has long been proved to be ineffectual.  They ostentatiously affect to proffer the useless thick end of the wedge at a point where it is only possible with much skill and prudence to insinuate the thin working end.

The general acceptance of the fact that syphilis and gonorrhoea are diseases, and not necessarily crimes or sins, is the condition for any practical attempt to deal with this question from the sanitary point of view which is now taking the place of the antiquated and ineffective police point of view.  The Scandinavian countries of Europe have been the pioneers in practical modern hygienic methods of dealing with venereal disease.  There are several reasons why this has come about.  All the problems of sex—­of sexual love as well as of sexual disease—­have long been prominent in these countries, and an impatience with prudish hypocrisy seems here to have been more pronounced than elsewhere; we see this spirit, for instance, emphatically embodied in the plays of Ibsen, and to some extent in Bjoernson’s works.  The fearless and energetic temper of the people impels them to deal practically with sexual difficulties, while their strong instincts of independence render them averse to the bureaucratic police methods which have flourished in Germany and France.  The Scandinavians have thus been the natural pioneers of the methods of combating venereal diseases which are now becoming generally recognized to be the methods of the future, and they have fully organized the system of putting venereal diseases under the ordinary law and dealing with them as with other contagious diseases.