Boys should learn that the man who insists on premarital sexual necessity has two roads open to him—­one that of the libertine and seducer, the most contemptible of creatures; the other that of the whore-follower, whom nature perpetually menaces with vile and pestilential plagues, making him a misery to himself and menace to all clean persons who associate with him, especially his future wife and unborn children.

This involves, at least for the present state of society, some information regarding the two chief venereal diseases:  that all prostitutes, professional or otherwise, are sooner or later infected, and that no reglementation can give security.  They should know something of the horrors of syphilis, its loathsomeness, its extraordinary power to penetrate to the physiological Holy of Holies, poison the germ cells, and damn in advance the unborn children of its victim.  They must know the fatal treachery of gonorrhea:  how it lurks unsuspected in the victim who supposes himself cured, and strikes, like a bolt out of clear sky, blinding newborn infants, and robbing innocent wives of motherhood, health, or life itself.

To object to this instruction because it is gruesome, or because it may seem like intimidation, is sentimentalism:  in this matter, as elsewhere in the realm of knowledge, the truth should scare no one who does not need to be scared.  It is better to be safe than sorry; and it is better to be scared than syphilitic.  “I dare do all that may become a man,” says Macbeth; “who dares do more is none”; let a man dare if he will with his own body, aye, his own soul; he is but a coward who does not shrink from buying voluptuous moments with the hazard of wife and child.  Hydrophobia is far less perilous than venereal disease, and if one hundredth as many were attacked by it the world would be placarded with scarlet danger signs; the man who decried the precautions as intimidation would be shut up in a home for imbeciles.  If this is intimidation, let us have more of it.

Above all, boys should learn the beauty and glory of the true relation of the sexes; the bond of love and unity between man and woman truly married—­in soul as well as body.  As he cherishes and vindicates the honor of his father and mother and sisters, so should he be taught to use his intelligence and heart to hold sacred in youth the powers and functions that will enable him to become in turn husband and father, to give a clean soul and body in marriage to a pure woman, and to pass on the germ of life to the children of his body.  A few lessons on heredity will show him that he is but the steward of an inheritance that has come down from a thousand ancestors and may well be perpetuated through generations to come.  Prudence is good; but no narrow selfish motive will meet the need.  The lad who is “good” merely for the sake of his own skin is usually a poor creature; the finest lad—­who might perhaps hazard his own individual fate—­will refuse to gamble with the souls and bodies of those others who shall be his own flesh and blood.  No virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic:  and only altruism is truly enthusiastic.