yphilis really
deterred, really acted as an efficient preventive of license, we might
have to tolerate this attitude of mind, even though we disagreed with
it. I had occasion, during a period of two years, to live in the most
intimate association with about 800 people who had syphilis--every kind
of person from the top to the bottom of the social scale. It was not a
simple matter of ordering pills for them from the pharmacy, or castor
oil from the medicine room. I had to sit beside their beds when they
heard the truth; I had to see the women crumple up and go limp; I had
to tell the blind child's father that he did it, to bolster up the weak
girl, to rebuild the wife's broken ideals, to suppress the rowdy and the
roysterer, to hear the vows of the boy who was paying for his first
mistake, and listen to the stories of the pimp and the seducer. What
made syphilis terrible to the many really fine and upright spirits in
the mass thus flung together in a common bondage? It was not the fear of
paresis, or of any other consequence of the disease. It was the torture
of disgrace, unearned shame, burnt into their backs by those who think
syphilis a weapon against prostitution and a punishment for sin. It
wrecked some of them effectually--left them nothing to live for. It
case-hardened others against the world in a way you and I can well pray
we may never be case-hardened. It left scars on others, and others
laughed it off. Hundreds of sexual offenders passed through my hands,
and in the closest study of their points of view I was unable to find
that in more than rare cases had the risk of syphilis any real power to
control the expression of their desires. Sexual morality is a complex
affair, in which the habit of self-control in many other activities of
life plays an important part. The man or woman who best deserves to be
called clean and honorable and sexually blameless has not become so
through a negative morality and an enlightened selfishness. The man who
does not have bred into him from childhood the instinct to say the
"everlasting no" to his passions will never learn to say it from the
fear of syphilis. Sexual self-control is a habit, not a reasoned-out
affair, and its foundation must rest on the rock bottom of character
and not in the muck of venereal disease.

+The Broader Outlook.+--If, then, it avails nothing in the uplifting of
our morals to treat syphilis as a disgrace, if the disease is
ineffective as a deterrent,