sible the detention of every
infected person.

Why can't we face the situation now when we are trying to tidy up our
social life. Health, that was necessary in war time, is surely equally
important in peace? Even the prostitute, the professional and the
amateur, will benefit: restrict the opportunities of this easy way of
getting money and presents from men and other ways of living and
obtaining presents must be resorted to. Thus there will be a finer
chance of reformation than ever there was before. To urge moral reforms,
to talk sloppy nonsense about liberty, about the poor prostitute, police
interference, and all that humbug; to seek cover under "the unequal
action of the laws between men and women," or any other form of excuse,
is willfully to falsify the position. For myself, I assert without a
shadow of hesitation, that I would quite gladly be wrongfully accused of
street soliciting, submit to medical examination, be mistakenly detained
in prison or any other indignity, if by so doing I knew I lessened by
ever so little the chance of a syphilitic child being born.

Is the evil to remain uncorrected from one generation to another? That
is the question. Uncorrected evil multiplies itself, and the sum is a
huge national disaster. I wish passionately that I had greater powers to
make you see what to me is so plain. The mistake has been the
muddle-headed thinking that sets apart these diseases from all other
sicknesses of our bodies, obscuring the plain and comparatively simple
question of cure with the entirely opposed problem of punishment; a
confusion and losing of the way that leads inevitably into a
forest-tangle of difficulty and unanswerable questions. And this
heritage of wrong-thinking has compassed our feet, binding them and
throwing us down, as soon as we try to move on, always hindering reform
from generation to generation, and, until that entanglement is broken
through, by bringing into it the light of honest thinking, the evil will
go on, unchecked by our futile tearings here and there at withered
branches. The supporting stem will continue to flourish and the
devastating diseases will be spread.

(See Sir G. Archdall Reid's letter in Appendix.)

FOOTNOTES:

[117:1] See Ed. Carpenter, "Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure."

[129:1] The Conference was held in the ball-room of the Club of the
Allied Officers at Cannes.

[129:2] In this connection, it should be noted that there was a time
when s