innocent from
suffering in place of the guilty. But it is absolutely impossible for him
to combine these two aims; syphilis cannot be at the same time perpetuated
for the guilty and abolished for the innocent.

I have been taking only syphilis into account, but nearly all
that is said of the accidental infection of syphilis applies with
equal or greater force to gonorrhoea, for though gonorrhoea does
not enter into the system by so many channels as syphilis, it is
a more common as well as a more subtle and elusive disease.

The literature of Syphilis Insontium is extremely extensive.
There is a bibliography at the end of Duncan Bulkley's _Syphilis
in the Innocent_, and a comprehensive summary of the question in
a Leipzig Inaugural Dissertation by F. Moses, _Zur Kasuistik der
Extragenitalen Syphilis-infektion_, 1904.

Even, however, when we have put aside the vast number of venereally
infected people who may be said to be, in the narrowest and most
conventionally moral sense, "innocent" victims of the diseases they have
contracted, there is still much to be said on this question. It must be
remembered that the majority of those who contract venereal diseases by
illegitimate sexual intercourse are young. They are youths, ignorant of
life, scarcely yet escaped from home, still undeveloped, incompletely
educated, and easily duped by women; in many cases they have met, as they
thought, a "nice" girl, not indeed strictly virtuous but, it seemed to
them, above all suspicion of disease, though in reality she was a
clandestine prostitute. Or they are young girls who have indeed ceased to
be absolutely chaste, but have not yet lost all their innocence, and who
do not consider themselves, and are not by others considered, prostitutes;
that indeed, is one of the rocks on which the system of police regulation
of prostitution comes to grief, for the police cannot catch the prostitute
at a sufficiently early stage. Of women who become syphilitic, according
to Fournier, twenty per cent. are infected before they are nineteen; in
hospitals the proportion is as high as forty per cent.; and of men fifteen
per cent. cases occur between eleven and twenty-one years of age. The age
of maximum frequency of infection is for women twenty years (in the rural
population eighteen), and for men twenty-three years. In Germany Erb
finds that as many as eighty-five per cent men with gonorrhoea
contracted the dis