pernicious is the system of inspection and regulation which legalizes and standardizes vice as a “necessary evil” and spreads disease through the false sense of security which it vainly promises.  Even if the inspection and regulation of vice were physically perfectly successful, it might still lead to national degeneration, but instead of being a success it has proved, especially in France, a miserable failure.  We cannot place all the blame upon local conditions, for the presence of an army in a foreign land in wartime creates its own danger.

Among the men in the venereal hospitals of France are musicians, artists, teachers, educated and refined boys from some of the best homes, and in another camp we find several hundred officers and several members of the nobility.  What was the cause of their downfall?  A questionnaire replied to by several hundred of them revealed the fact that six per cent attributed their downfall to curiosity, ten per cent to ignorance, claiming that they had never been adequately warned by the medical authorities, thirteen per cent to loss of home influences and lack of leave, thirty-three per cent to drink and the loss of self-control due to intoxication, while the largest number of all, or thirty-eight per cent, attributed it to uncontrolled passion when they were unconverted or had no higher power in their lives to enable them to withstand temptation.  But perhaps the chief cause of the spread of immorality is the unnatural conditions under which the men are compelled to live in a foreign land in war time.

Donald Hankey, the brilliant young author of “A Student in Arms,” who fell at the front, speaks thus of the moral problem in the soldier’s life: 

“Let us be frank about this.  What a doctor might call the ‘appetites’ and a padre the ‘lusts’ of the body, hold dominion over the average man, whether civilian or soldier, unless they are counteracted by a stronger power.  The only men who are pure are those who are absorbed in some pursuit, or possessed by a great love; be it the love of clean, wholesome life which is religion, or the love of a noble man which is hero-worship, or the love of a true woman.  These are the four powers which are stronger than ’the flesh’—­the zest of a quest, religion, hero-worship, and the love of a good woman.  If a man is not possessed by one of these he will be immoral. . . .  Fifteen months ago I was a private quartered in a camp near A——. . . .  The tent was damp, gloomy, and cold.  The Y M C A tent and the Canteen tent were crowded.  One wandered off to the town. . . .  And if a fellow ran up against ’a bit of skirt’ he was generally just in the mood to follow it wherever it might lead.  The moral of this is, double your subscriptions to the Y M C A, Church huts, soldiers’ clubs, or whatever organization you fancy!  You will be helping to combat vice in the only sensible way.”