ho will give the world a novel or a book dealing with this terrific
problem? Who will tell millions of young men around the age of twenty
that they cannot burn their candle at both ends? With the ordinary man
in civil life the temptation is a negligible quantity compared to the
life of a soldier or sailor. In the army and navy it is talked
incessantly so that a man has a double battle to fight. He fights the
thing and he fights a multitude of suggestions that come to him every
day of his life.

The most revolting, disgusting and degrading thing I ever heard talked
about on a man o' war was the perversion of the sex instinct--the
unnatural use of it! This, too, is a joke and laughed at and talked
lightly about; but the records of the British Navy, and I think of
other navies, would reveal something along this line that would shock
civilization. I did not believe this possible, but the first six
months on board changed my mind.

To the great credit of the British Navy, be it said that this crime is
held almost equal to murder, and when an officer is convicted of it,
the trial is _in camera_, and the findings kept secret; but no matter
how high his rank, he is stripped of his standing and marched over the
side of the ship as a degraded criminal and an outcast. A man of the
ranks convicted of it usually spends the rest of his natural life in
prison.

The two things responsible for such perversion in the navy are: first,
the herding of the male sex together and for long periods; second, the
mode of dress in which little boys begin their sea life. These are the
problems before which all others sink into utter insignificance. The
army and navy of Great Britain, is recruited very largely from the
slums of great cities. The most ignorant, the most brutal and most
immoral of mankind are drafted by the incentive of a better life than
they have ever known; but they are only changed outwardly. Their
nature, their habits of life, their mental make-up, does not change;
or, if it changes to the automatic action by which they become part
of a war machine they lose that individual freedom that is the boast
of the Anglo-Saxon race.

On the other hand, I must say that in all my contact with life, I have
never met nor been associated with a group of men more gentlemanly,
better educated, or whose total sum of right thinking and right living
was higher than that group of officers on that ship. I certainly
attribute a great deal of my qu