should not be mentioned in my presence or in any book that is intended for family reading.’  Wicked and foolish as the spirit of this attitude is, the practice of it is so easy and lazy and uppish that it is very common, but its cry is drowned by a louder and more sincere one.  We who do not want to know, also do not want to go blind, to go mad, to be disfigured, to be barren, to become pestiferous, or to see such things happening to our children.  We learn, at last, that the majority of the victims are not the people of whom we so glibly say, ’Serve them right,’ but quite innocent children and innocent parents, smitten by a contagion which, no matter in what vice it may or may not have originated, contaminates the innocent and the guilty alike, once it is launched, exactly as any other contagious disease does; that indeed it often hits the innocent and misses the guilty, because the guilty know the danger and take elaborate precautions against it, whilst the innocent, who have been either carefully kept from any knowledge of their danger, or erroneously led to believe that contagion is possible through misconduct only, run into danger blindfold.  Once knock this fact into people’s minds, and their self-righteous indifference and intolerance soon change into lively concern for themselves and their families.”

The facts seem so plain, and yet there is still great opposition to the promotion of a knowledge of sexual cleanliness and self-disinfection.  Only a short time ago (the end of 1920), Sir Frederick Mott, the great authority on syphilis, felt obliged to oppose some opponents of self-disinfection at a public enquiry in London in this fashion:—­

“The point is that large numbers of innocent women have suffered from disease.  They are rendered sterile, have miscarriages and abortions, and large numbers have been ruined.  I have been connected with the London County Asylums for twenty-five years, and I have seen in those asylums people from all states of society, and I have seen them die of general paralysis.  Five per cent. of the people who get syphilis, in spite of treatment, develop this disease.  That is only one aspect of it.  I was on the Royal Commission on Venereal Disease, and Sir William Osier, who was a great authority, said that he could teach medicine on syphilis alone, because every tissue in the body is affected by it, and that the diseases of blindness, deafness, insanity and every form of disease may be due to syphilis.  You have only to consider the effect that it had upon the army, and I understand that more than two army corps were invalided during the war on account of venereal disease.  What have you to say to that?  Does not that create some anxiety?”

It is difficult even to read this eloquent appeal—­the more eloquent perhaps because it was quite unpremeditated—­without being deeply moved.  Yet the witnesses opposing Sir Frederick Mott were apparently unaffected.  Of them, as of men of old, it might justly be said:—­