[250] Modern democratic sentiment is opposed to the sequestration of a prostitute merely because she is diseased.  But there can be no reasonable doubt whatever that if a diseased prostitute infects another person, and is unable to pay the very heavy damages which should be demanded in such a case, she ought to be secluded and subjected to treatment.  That is necessary in the interests of the community.  But it is also necessary, to avoid placing a premium on the commission of an offence which would ensure gratuitous treatment and provision for a prostitute without means, that she should be furnished with facilities for treatment in any case.

[251] It has, however, been decided by the Paris Court of Appeal that for a husband to marry when knowingly suffering from a venereal disease and to communicate that disease to his wife is a sufficient cause for divorce (Semaine Medicale, May, 1896).

[252] The large volume, entitled Sexualpaedagogik, containing the Proceedings of the Third of these Congresses, almost ignores the special subject of venereal disease, and is devoted to the questions involved by the general sexual education of the young, which, as many of the speakers maintained, must begin with the child at his mother’s knee.

[253] “Workmen, soldiers, and so on,” Neisser remarks (Senator and Kaminer, Health and Disease in Relation to Marriage, vol. ii, p. 485), “can more easily find non-prostitute girls of their own class willing to enter into amorous relations with them which result in sexual intercourse, and they are therefore less exposed to the danger of infection than those men who have recourse almost exclusively to prostitutes” (see also Bloch, Sexualleben unserer Zeit, p. 437).

[254] The character and extent of such lectures are fully discussed in the Proceedings of the Third Congress of the German Society for Combating Venereal Diseases, Sexualpaedagogik, 1907.

[255] I leave out of account, as beyond the scope of the present work, the auxiliary aids to the suppression of venereal diseases furnished by the promising new methods, only now beginning to be understood, of treating or even aborting such diseases (see, e.g., Metchnikoff, The New Hygiene, 1906).

[256] Max von Niessen, “Herr Doktor, darf ich heiraten?” Mutterschutz, 1906, p. 352.

CHAPTER IX.

SEXUAL MORALITY.

Prostitution in Relation to Our Marriage System—­Marriage and
Morality—­The Definition of the Term “Morality”—­Theoretical Morality—­Its
Division Into Traditional Morality and Ideal Morality—­Practical
Morality—­Practical Morality Based on Custom—­The Only Subject of
Scientific Ethics—­The Reaction Between Theoretical and Practical
Morality—­Sexual Morality in the Past an Application of Economic
Morality—­The Combined Rigidity and Laxity of This Morality—­The