In various times and places, almost everything from promiscuous sexual intercourse to absolute abstinence from all intercourse has been held holy, or permissible, or damnable.  Even among Christians the widest differences have prevailed as regards the local and contemporary tone.  Among them, especially among the English speaking peoples, a convention forbids the familiar discussion of sexual matters between children and adults.  This convention may be right or wrong.  In any case it exists, and is likely to persist for ages.  But a knowledge of sex is traditional among boys, and to some extent among girls of the school age.  For good or evil, therefore, children are the real teachers of sexual morals in England.  Children deal with the impressionable age and give the early bias.  Adults stand aside, and teach only extreme reticence.  The discussions of boys are often obscene.  As a consequence vast numbers grow up with the idea that unchastity is a gallant adventure, or, at worst, only a peccadillo.  Even in old age such men look back to past intrigues with satisfaction.  After marriage another tradition, or bias, also taught by English boys, comes into action—­the tradition to keep the plighted word, to “play the game.”  The great majority of married Englishmen, therefore, are chaste.

Judging from history, the world, and in particular England, is not more—­or less—­immoral to-day than at any time during the last 2000 years.  During all that time children have taught and adults have preached.  Doubtless there have been many campaigns of purity in the past—­mere campaigns of preaching to adults.  They were ineffectual and are forgotten.  Epochs of licence have almost invariably followed epochs of austerity.  Modern campaigns of purity never arise except as consequents on medical attempts to prevent venereal disease, and always cease when the attempt to procure sanitation has ceased.  In effect, they have been merely campaigns to secure the poisoning of sinners and their victims.

The extent of current immorality may be judged from the prevalence of venereal disease.  The Royal Commission of 1913-16 found that ten per cent. of the urban population suffered from syphilis.  Eighty per cent. of the population of the United Kingdom is now urban, and gonorrhoea is six or seven times as prevalent as syphilis.  It follows that at least every other person in the Kingdom has suffered from venereal disease.  Probably not a family has escaped infection.  In proportion to its prevalence syphilis is not very deadly, yet it has been reckoned as the fourth killing disease.  The victims of gonorrhoea are incalculable.  Venereal diseases fill our hospitals, asylums, and workhouses.  They are the principal causes of heart disease, apoplexy, paralysis, insanity, blindness in children, and of that life of sterility and pain to which so many women are condemned.  It is said that chastity is the only real safeguard against venereal disease.  But this is always said by people who have never stirred a finger to teach chastity, but who have only preached it.  At any time there are at least a million of perfectly innocent sufferers, principally women and children, in the United Kingdom.