h the men are to learn
from these three hours of talk on syphilis? To be sure, it is
suggested that it would be best if every young man were to marry early
and remain faithful to his wife and take care that she remain faithful
to him. But this aphorism will make very little impression on the kind
of listener whose tendency would naturally turn him in other
directions. He hears in the play far more facts which encourage him in
his selfish instincts. He hears the old doctor assuring his patient
that not more than a negligible 10 per cent. of all men enter married
life without having had sexual intercourse with women. He hears that
the disease can be easily cured, that he may marry quite safely after
three years, that the harm done to the child can be removed, and that
no one ought to be blamed for acquiring the disease, as anybody may
acquire it and that it is only a matter of good or bad luck. The
president of the Medical Society in Boston drew the perfectly correct
consequences when in a warm recommendation of the play he emphasized
the importance of the knowledge about the disease, inasmuch as any one
may acquire it in a hundred ways which have nothing to do with sexual
life. He says anybody may get syphilis by wetting a lead pencil with
his lips or from an infected towel or from a pipe or from a drinking
glass or from a cigarette. This is medically entirely correct, and yet
if Brieux had added this medical truth to all the other medical
sayings of his doctor, he would have taken away the whole meaning of
the play and would have put it just on the level of a dramatized story
about scarlet fever or typhoid.

Yet here, too, the fundamental mistake remains the psychological one.
The play hopes to reform by the appeal to fear, while the whole mental
mechanism of man is so arranged that in the emotional tension of the
sexual desire the argument of the fear that we may have bad luck will
always be outbalanced by the hope and conviction that we will not be
the one who draws the black ball. And together with this psychological
fact goes the other stubborn feature of the mind, which no sermon can
remove, that the focussing of the attention on the sexual problems,
even in their repelling form, starts too often a reaction of glands
and with it sexual thoughts which ultimately lead to a desire for
satisfaction.

The cleverest of this group of plays strictly intended for sexual
education--as Shaw's "Mrs. Warren's Profession" or p