cription of
any one national treatment, or proposed treatment of the problem, but
rather a composite hotch-potch, intended to include the main features of
the new and old schemes based on State interference and regulation of
vice.

The opposite school of thought produces an opposite scheme; one that I
may, perhaps, call an ethical Sunday-school plan of salvation by means
of guidance and gentle persuasions. They would educate people in the
fact that all _promiscuous intercourse is likely to be dangerous_, and
recommend only an alteration of the laws of marriage and divorce to meet
cases of marital infection and to protect children who are infected by
negligence. Such a course of mild action is widely supported by bishops
and by "sheltered" women, who reveal to us curiously the psychology of
the class, which, throughout the Victorian period, practiced idealism on
the easiest methods.

The practical objections usually advanced to "the interference school"
are that laws of regulation create an illusory sense of security which
encourages vice and increases the spread of disease. No inspection,
however widely and well regulated, can guarantee that it will detect
_all_ infected persons, but the idea will prevail that all infected at
any time are "locked up." A still stronger objection as urged by women,
arises from the fact that the law will not be equal in its treatment of
the two sexes: the man on the spree after his day's work will seek his
pleasure without danger of the law's hand, while a woman, _in a similar
position, in work and not asking for money_, will be liable to arrest
for soliciting, and detention and imprisonment, if affected. I shall
have more to say soon on this question; here I will remark only that in
bringing forward these objections I am not stating opinions of my own,
but trying to be fair to objections, which, I know, are strong in the
minds of the majority of women. But I diverge a little in these comments
from my present work of classifying schemes.

The third type of treatment pursues, of course, a moderate, middle
course. Registration and treatment of disease should not be compulsory,
because, as opinion at present is, this course will lead merely to
concealment on the part of the sufferers, whereas medical treatment at
the earliest possible hour is what is aimed at; but free treatment and
provision of curative safeguards should be provided to all who apply for
them, and always with secrecy. (The