umbled and fallen. Any person who sees, not
this essential fact but merely some subsidiary aspect of it, reveals a
mind that is twisted and perverted; he has no claim to arrest our
attention.

But even if we were to adopt the standpoint of the would-be moralist, and
to agree that everyone must be left to suffer his deserts, it is far
indeed from being the fact that all those who contract venereal diseases
are in any sense receiving their deserts. In a large number of cases the
disease has been inflicted on them in the most absolutely involuntary
manner. This is, of course, true in the case of the vast number of infants
who are infected at conception or at birth. But it is also true in a
scarcely less absolute manner of a large proportion of persons infected in
later life.

_Syphilis insontium_, or syphilis of the innocent, as it is commonly
called, may be said to fall into five groups: (1) the vast army of
congenitally syphilitic infants who inherit the disease from father or
mother; (2) the constantly occurring cases of syphilis contracted, in the
course of their professional duties, by doctors, midwives and wet-nurses;
(3) infection as a result of affection, as in simple kissing; (4)
accidental infection from casual contacts and from using in common the
objects and utensils of daily life, such as cups, towels, razors, knives
(as in ritual circumcision), etc; (5) the infection of wives by their
husbands.[240]

Hereditary congenital syphilis belongs to the ordinary pathology of the
disease and is a chief element in its social danger since it is
responsible for an enormous infantile mortality.[241] The risks of
extragenital infection in the professional activity of doctors, midwives
and wet-nurses is also universally recognized. In the case of wet-nurses
infected by their employers' syphilitic infants at their breast, the
penalty inflicted on the innocent is peculiarly harsh and unnecessary. The
influence of infected low-class midwives is notably dangerous, for they
may inflict widespread injury in ignorance; thus the case has been
recorded of a midwife, whose finger became infected in the course of her
duties, and directly or indirectly contaminated one hundred persons.
Kissing is an extremely common source of syphilitic infection, and of all
extragenital regions the mouth is by far the most frequent seat of primary
syphilitic sores. In some cases, it is true, especially in prostitutes,
this is the result of abnormal