(4) The employment of paid prostitutes for man’s gratification keeps in existence the unhappiest and most degraded class in the world.  Brutalized and worn by their abnormal life, treated with coarse indignities which they cannot resent, deprived of their birthright of genuine love, of wifehood and motherhood, stricken with disease and doomed to an early death, thousands of the prettiest, reddest-blooded, most promising young girls of our land, the girls who ought to be bearing healthy children and rearing the future citizens of the State, now walk the streets painted and gaudily bedecked, seeking their miserable livelihood, and snaring the heedless and restless youth of the cities, the “young men void of understanding,” to their common degradation.  This human wastage is worse upon the race than war; and all the more pathetic because it consists of girls scarcely past the threshold of their maidenhood.  When we consider further the indescribably horrible cruelty of the “white-slave trade,” which the insatiable lust of men has brought into being, we may begin to realize to what the absence of restraint upon this appetite has led.

It is quite conceivable that within the near future the venereal diseases will be rendered entirely curable by the progress of medicine.  It is possible that some certain and harmless method of preventing conception will be found and become so universally known that the danger of unintentional childbirth will become practically nonexistent.  Such a situation would remove the most obvious reasons for chastity, and would insure a rapid growth of free-love sentiment.  It would be pointed out that free love would do away with the shameful existence of the paid prostitutes, and that thus all four of the basic reasons above given for chastity would no longer exist.  To discuss such possibilities may seem premature.  But as a matter of fact, even now every one who indulges in “free” love hopes to escape disease and conception.  And there is an increasing propaganda insisting on the removal of the old conventions and the permission of promiscuous love.  The spirit of adventure is in the air; and with even a good chance of escaping the penalties, there are many who will seize their opportunities for enjoyment, preferring a present pleasure with its spice of risk to a dull negation of desire.  We must then go on with the argument and point out that even where these terrible results are escaped, the way of free love is not the happiest way.

(5) Freedom from restraint in inter-sex relations inevitably leads, in the majority of men and women, to an overindulgence which seriously impairs health and efficiency.  The one salient motive for the opposition of ancient codes to sex license was the necessity of preserving the virility of the young men for war.  Today athletes are enjoined to chastity.  But, indeed, if a man would succeed in anything, he must check this so easily overdeveloped impulse.  Promiscuity means a continually renewed stimulus;