Who will give the world a novel or a book dealing with this terrific problem? Who will tell millions of young men around the age of twenty that they cannot burn their candle at both ends? With the ordinary man in civil life the temptation is a negligible quantity compared to the life of a soldier or sailor. In the army and navy it is talked incessantly so that a man has a double battle to fight. He fights the thing and he fights a multitude of suggestions that come to him every day of his life.
The most revolting, disgusting and degrading thing I ever heard talked about on a man o' war was the perversion of the sex instinct—the unnatural use of it! This, too, is a joke and laughed at and talked lightly about; but the records of the British Navy, and I think of other navies, would reveal something along this line that would shock civilization. I did not believe this possible, but the first six months on board changed my mind.
To the great credit of the British Navy, be it said that this crime is held almost equal to murder, and when an officer is convicted of it, the trial is in camera, and the findings kept secret; but no matter how high his rank, he is stripped of his standing and marched over the side of the ship as a degraded criminal and an outcast. A man of the ranks convicted of it usually spends the rest of his natural life in prison.
The two things responsible for such perversion in the navy are: first, the herding of the male sex together and for long periods; second, the mode of dress in which little boys begin their sea life. These are the problems before which all others sink into utter insignificance. The army and navy of Great Britain, is recruited very largely from the slums of great cities. The most ignorant, the most brutal and most immoral of mankind are drafted by the incentive of a better life than they have ever known; but they are only changed outwardly. Their nature, their habits of life, their mental make-up, does not change; or, if it changes to the automatic action by which they become part of a war machine they lose that individual freedom that is the boast of the Anglo-Saxon race.
On the other hand, I must say that in all my contact with life, I have never met nor been associated with a group of men more gentlemanly, better educated, or whose total sum of right thinking and right living was higher than that group of officers on that ship. I certainly attribute a great deal of my quickening of mind to contact with them.