morality as
a reason for ignoring the social necessity of combating venereal disease,
because although there may not be many who seriously and understandingly
adopt so anti-social and inhuman an attitude there are certainly many who
are glad at need of the existence of so fine an excuse for their moral
indifference or their mental indolence.[242] When they are confronted by
this great and difficult problem they find it easy to offer the remedy of
conventional morality, although they are well aware that on a large scale
that remedy has long been proved to be ineffectual. They ostentatiously
affect to proffer the useless thick end of the wedge at a point where it
is only possible with much skill and prudence to insinuate the thin
working end.

The general acceptance of the fact that syphilis and gonorrhoea
are diseases, and not necessarily crimes or sins, is the condition for any
practical attempt to deal with this question from the sanitary point of
view which is now taking the place of the antiquated and ineffective
police point of view. The Scandinavian countries of Europe have been the
pioneers in practical modern hygienic methods of dealing with venereal
disease. There are several reasons why this has come about. All the
problems of sex--of sexual love as well as of sexual disease--have long
been prominent in these countries, and an impatience with prudish
hypocrisy seems here to have been more pronounced than elsewhere; we see
this spirit, for instance, emphatically embodied in the plays of Ibsen,
and to some extent in Bjoernson's works. The fearless and energetic temper
of the people impels them to deal practically with sexual difficulties,
while their strong instincts of independence render them averse to the
bureaucratic police methods which have flourished in Germany and France.
The Scandinavians have thus been the natural pioneers of the methods of
combating venereal diseases which are now becoming generally recognized
to be the methods of the future, and they have fully organized the system
of putting venereal diseases under the ordinary law and dealing with them
as with other contagious diseases.

The first step in dealing with a contagious disease is to apply to it the
recognized principles of notification. Every new application of the
principle, it is true, meets with opposition. It is without practical
result, it is an unwarranted inquisition into the affairs of the
individual, it is a new tax on the bus