ease between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, a very
small percentage being infected after thirty. These young things for the
most part fell into a trap which Nature had baited with her most
fascinating lure; they were usually ignorant; not seldom they were
deceived by an attractive personality; often they were overcome by
passion; frequently all prudence and reserve had been lost in the fumes of
wine. From a truly moral point of view they were scarcely less innocent
than children.

"I ask," says Duclaux, "whether when a young man, or a young
girl, abandon themselves to a dangerous caress society has done
what it can to warn them. Perhaps its intentions were good, but
when the need came for precise knowledge a silly prudery has held
it back, and it has left its children without _viaticum_.... I
will go further, and proclaim that in a large number of cases the
husbands who contaminate their wives are innocent. No one is
responsible for the evil which he commits without knowing it and
without willing it." I may recall the suggestive fact, already
referred to, that the majority of husbands who infect their wives
contracted the disease before marriage. They entered on marriage
believing that their disease was cured, and that they had broken
with their past. Doctors have sometimes (and quacks frequently)
contributed to this result by too sanguine an estimate of the
period necessary to destroy the poison. So great an authority as
Fournier formerly believed that the syphilitic could safely be
allowed to marry three or four years after the date of infection,
but now, with increased experience, he extends the period to four
or five years. It is undoubtedly true that, especially when
treatment has been thorough and prompt, the diseased
constitution, in a majority of cases, can be brought under
complete control in a shorter period than this, but there is
always a certain proportion of cases in which the powers of
infection persist for many years, and even when the syphilitic
husband is no longer capable of infecting his wife he may still
perhaps be in a condition to effect a disastrous influence on the
offspring.

In nearly all these cases there was more or less ignorance--which is but
another word for innocence as we commonly understand innocence--and when
at last, after the event, the facts are more or less bluntly e