putting out the eyes of the boy who made a slip through bad companionship and mutilating the girl who loved “not wisely but too well.”  Only innocence pays the spiritual price of syphilis.  The very ones whose punishment it should be are the most indifferent to it, and the least influenced by fear of it in their pursuit of sexual gratification.  I always recall with a shock the utterance of a university professor in the days when salvarsan was expected to cure syphilis at a single dose.  He rated it as a catastrophe that any such drug should have been discovered, because he felt that it would remove a great barrier to promiscuous relations between men and women—­the fear of venereal disease.  This is the point of view that perpetuates the disease among us.  It is this attitude of mind that maintains an atmosphere of disgrace and secrecy and shame about a great problem in public health and muddles our every attempt to solve it.  Those who feel syphilis to be an instrument adapted to warfare against sexual mistakes, and are prepared to concede “frightfulness” to be honorable warfare, will, of course, fold their hands and smugly roll their eyes as they repeat the words of the secretary of a London Lock hospital, “I don’t believe in making it safe."[14]

    [14] Quoted by Flexner in “Prostitution in Europe.”

+Syphilis as a “Disgrace” and a “Moral Force."+—­If syphilis really deterred, really acted as an efficient preventive of license, we might have to tolerate this attitude of mind, even though we disagreed with it.  I had occasion, during a period of two years, to live in the most intimate association with about 800 people who had syphilis—­every kind of person from the top to the bottom of the social scale.  It was not a simple matter of ordering pills for them from the pharmacy, or castor oil from the medicine room.  I had to sit beside their beds when they heard the truth; I had to see the women crumple up and go limp; I had to tell the blind child’s father that he did it, to bolster up the weak girl, to rebuild the wife’s broken ideals, to suppress the rowdy and the roysterer, to hear the vows of the boy who was paying for his first mistake, and listen to the stories of the pimp and the seducer.  What made syphilis terrible to the many really fine and upright spirits in the mass thus flung together in a common bondage?  It was not the fear of paresis, or of any other consequence of the disease.  It was the torture of disgrace, unearned shame, burnt into their backs by those who think syphilis a weapon against prostitution and a punishment for sin.  It wrecked some of them effectually—­left them nothing to live for.  It case-hardened others against the world in a way you and I can well pray we may never be case-hardened.  It left scars on others, and others laughed it off.  Hundreds of sexual offenders passed through my hands, and in the closest study of their points of view I was unable to find that in more than rare cases had the risk