avoid the grosser risks of contamination and enable them to recognize and
avoid danger at the earliest stages.

A few years ago, when no method of combating venereal disease was known
except that system of police regulation which is now in its decadence, it
would have been impossible to bring forward such considerations as these;
they would have seemed Utopian. To-day they are not only recognizable as
practical, but they are being actually put into practice, although, it is
true, with very varying energy and insight in different countries. Yet it
is certain that in the competition of nationalities, as Max von Niessen
has well said, "that country will best take a leading place in the march
of civilization which has the foresight and courage to introduce and carry
through those practical movements of sexual hygiene which have so wide and
significant a bearing on its own future, and that of the human race
generally."[256]

FOOTNOTES:

[220] It is probable that Schopenhauer felt a more than merely speculative
interest in this matter. Bloch has shown good reason for believing that
Schopenhauer himself contracted syphilis in 1813, and that this was a
factor in constituting his conception of the world and in confirming his
constitutional pessimism (_Medizinische Klinik_, Nos. 25 and 26, 1906).

[221] Havelburg, in Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation
to Marriage_, vol. i, pp. 186-189.

[222] This is the very definite opinion of Lowndes after an experience of
fifty-four years in the treatment of venereal diseases in Liverpool
(_British Medical Journal_, Feb. 9, 1907, p. 334). It is further indicated
by the fact (if it is a real fact) that since 1876 there has been a
decline of both the infantile and general mortality from syphilis in
England.

[223] "There is no doubt whatever that syphilis is on the increase in
London, judging from hospital work alone," says Pernet (_British Medical
Journal_, March 30, 1907). Syphilis was evidently very prevalent, however,
a century or two ago, and there is no ground for asserting positively that
it is more prevalent to-day.

[224] See, e.g., A. Neisser, _Die experimentelle Syphilisforschung_, 1906,
and E. Hoffmann (who was associated with Schaudinn's discovery), _Die
Aetiologie der Syphilis_, 1906; D'Arcy Power, _A System of Syphilis_,
1908, etc.; F.W. Mott, "Pathology of Syphilis in the Light of Modern
Research," _British Medical Journal_, February 20, 1909; also, _A