In the fourth place, we favor adequate medical provisions, coupled with the highest moral restraints.  We will take our stand against any league with vice, against any recognition of immorality as a “necessary evil.”  We will stand against all notices, lectures, or medical talks such as are given in some quarters, which practically serve as an invitation or solicitation to immorality.  We would oppose any provision on the part of the authorities to provide in advance for immorality, to standardize it, accept it, and attempt to render it safe, and we would oppose any mention of it which tends to advertise and increase the evil.  We would strenuously oppose the running of supervised houses of prostitution by our own military authorities, as was done by some of them on the Mexican border.  Conceivably a system of inspected government houses and of prophylactic measures might be devised which would eliminate disease altogether, and yet demoralize the young manhood of our nation by a cynical scientific materialism such as we are fighting against in the powers that dragged the world into this war.  We are more opposed to immorality than to disease, which is its penalty.  We fear not only the impairment of the physical fitness of the men as a fighting force, but much more the menace of the moral degradation of the manhood of the nation, under the unnatural conditions of wartime.

We believe that the hearty cooperation of the medical and moral agencies and of the military and voluntary forces which have to do with the men, can greatly reduce both immorality and disease.  We feel sure, moreover, that the solid backing of public opinion in America will support every effort to surround our camps with a zone of safety and to keep the men clean and strong in the multiplied dangers of a foreign land, as well as in the military camps of our own country.  It is reassuring to know that our military authorities abroad have taken a strong stand and that in no army in Europe are drunkenness and the contraction of venereal disease more instantly court-martialled or more severely punished.

CHAPTER VII

RELIGION AT THE FRONT

The war, like a great searchlight thrown across our individual and national lives, has revealed men and nations to themselves.  It has shown us the nation’s manhood suddenly stripped of the conventionalities, the restraints, and the outward respectability of civil life, subjected to the trial and testing of a prodigious strain.  It has shown us the real stuff of which men are made.  It is like the X-ray photographs now constantly used in all the military hospitals, and placed in the windows of the operating rooms, to guide the surgeon in discovering the hidden pieces of shrapnel or shattered bones which must be removed in order to save the patient.