as marriage.  This, apart altogether from the fact that marriage is fertile and prostitution infertile.  No, both man and woman desire love-relationship, not loveless-relationship; and they are really quite fit to be trusted with the evolution of the race through passionate love and the worship of beauty, as soon as society makes harmonious provision for their normal sexual needs.  Until society does make early marriage practicable for all healthy adult men and women, say between twenty and twenty-five years of age, extra-marital relationship, however undesirable, is inevitable, because there are many men to whom, at times, any woman is better than no woman.

But extra-marital relationship is never even safe, because of its promiscuity and impermanence, except in properly conducted and effectively supervised tolerated houses.  The tolerated house is absolutely necessary at present to protect women from disease and immorality, by confining this kind of intercourse as far as possible in certain definite channels.  The abolition of the tolerated house spreads both disease and immorality into classes of women who would otherwise be immune, and enormously increases the dangers of promiscuous intercourse.  Separated from their toilet equipment the women cannot make and keep themselves clean; on the streets they are not taught to refuse intercourse with diseased men; thus their occupation becomes more and more dangerous as medical supervision is removed.  They inevitably become diseased; sometimes contract mixed infections, which they pass on to their clients—­the future husbands and fathers of the nation—­and “The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation.”  All this would be impossible if women generally would recognise the primary fact that because a man is immoral that it is no reason why he should become syphilitic.  We all want to abolish sin, but failing that we must cease wanting to poison the sinner.  We must actively work to save him from the penalties of his folly, for that is the only way in which we can save his victims and succeed ultimately in “Making Marriage Safe.”

Similarly every effort should be made to prevent women becoming diseased, no matter how immoral they may be.  The prostitute is very often a woman of peculiar mentality or overdeveloped animal instincts; and many women are driven to prostitution by drink and poverty.  The prostitute class is largely recruited from mentally and morally deficient girls, who are themselves the offspring of syphilitic or alcoholic parents.  Prostitution is the effect—­not the cause—­of anti-social acts and conditions.  We must remedy the causes of these before we can hope to remove the effects.  Under present social conditions, attempting to abolish prostitution by shutting up tolerated houses is just as idle as attempting to lower the temperature of a room by smashing the thermometer.  All we can do is to make and keep these women clean.  If we decline to do even that, then diseased women will succeed in contaminating our men much faster than we can instruct the men in sexual cleanliness.[B]