XXII HOW SHALL WE MINISTER TO WORLD DISEASED?
It is not without a certain significance that, while French and German soldiery were sacrificing themselves by their thousands to the Gods of War in and around the blood-stained village street of Douaumont, while our soldiers were holding on to the line of the Tigris, near whose source Russian forces were marching southward to the rescue, the Royal Commission appointed to investigate what is euphemistically called "Social Disease," issued its report. The coincidence from certain view-points is startling.
The report, definitely limited as to its scope, sober in its statement, and appalling in its revelation, is a solemn reminder to the world of civilised men that there are enemies equally deadly and more insidious than those with whom any belligerent is concerned. The victims of the diseases discussed probably outnumber, in Great Britain alone, all her defenders on sea and land. Four millions of our population, with power to add to their number, are at grips with a deadly enemy in various stages of its virulence; an enemy who will "visit the sins of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation." Nay more, the Commissioners whose trained minds lend solid value to their every utterance, assure us that after a war an excessive incidence of disease is certain to occur, even in districts previously free. There are other significant comments. "Our evidence," they tell us, "tends to show that the communication of disease is frequently due to intoxicants, and there is no doubt that the growth of temperance among the population would help to bring about an amelioration. We are also conscious of the fact that overcrowded and insanitary dwellings contribute to the spread of disease, and from improvements in this direction we should expect some diminution of its prevalence."
Let us consider the full meaning of these vivid comments. When war is over, we shall celebrate the coming of peace throughout the length and breadth of these islands. Countless offerings will be laid before the altar of the brewer and the distiller; it will be almost dangerous to be an abstainer. For a time, at least, the barriers of restraint will be torn down. Something known as "good fellowship" will at once dictate and excuse an orgie. The discipline that weak minds require will be honoured in the breach rather than the observance, and "an excessive incidence of disease is certain to occur, even in districts previously free."
When a town is successfully invaded, and a soldiery, grown reckless after lying cheek by jowl with death flings his self-discipline, mercy, and restraint to the winds, the world that has not lost its reason is sick at heart. When peace is proclaimed, and the return to civil life is associated with a licence that outrages the living and damns the unborn, there is apparently no authority that can intervene, no public opinion capable of making itself felt. The living, and those upon whom the heaviest burden of life is to be imposed, are alike unprotected. Not only is this so, but the conditions that must make for their undoing are cultivated in the interests of those who flood the land with spirits and malt liquors. What if our slums help infection to spread? Are not slum-owners often men of repute, some of whom sit in the high seats of judgment and help to administer a world they are willing to degrade still further in the sacred name of rent? Do we not make a man a Peer if he can brew sufficient beer? The Commissioners know better than to plead for an England sober or an England adequately housed. Theirs not to presume to attack vested interests. They have dared greatly in pointing out what the slum and the gin palaces contribute to the spread of most loathsome diseases under heaven. There they must stop. They know their public. "Improvement in the social conditions and in the moral standard may be slow." They have realised what our modern political conditions stand for throughout Great Britain. They even admit that there may be no money for improvement; European civilisation, however inadequate to human needs, however imperfect and incomplete, can only be destroyed at heavy expense. The destruction demands the best life-blood of every belligerent nation and all available financial resources. What can be left to combat "social disease," cancer, consumption, drink, slums, and the other evils that destroy even more than war, but have nothing arresting or spectacular in their methods? The Commissioners plead, it would seem, with more of earnestness than hope.
Perhaps the most appalling side of "social disease" is due to its utter absence of respect for persons. We could wish in the interests of humanity as at present constituted that the germs could themselves be inoculated with genuine English snobbery, so that they would refrain from attacking "high personages." Apparently, germs are untutored things. They ignore class distinctions. They attack with equal impartiality the drunken soldier of a garrison town, the sailor set free, after a long voyage, in an evil seaport with money burning holes in his pocket, and the crowned head who, in the days of his indiscretion, lived as lewdly as the soldier or sailor without the excuse of either. The wages of sin is death. "Social disease" affects the ordered function of the brain, and when that brain is in the skull of one who controls the destinies of Empire, the dread death-wages must be paid by the rank and file of his subjects. Nobody has dared yet to write fully and freely of the influence of social disease upon the decrees of European rulers. Though the hideous facts are known well enough in certain circles, they are hardly discussed. Perhaps the scandal is one from which the sharpest pen shrinks appalled. Consider the cercle privé from which Europe's dynasts spring, the tendencies of upbringing, the intermarriage, the temptation, the effect upon narrow minds and exhausted stocks. The light is beginning to shine upon thrones. The world is beginning to ask why so much of madness is manifest in the ranks of rulers, and whether in the wide interests of humanity the breed is not of more importance than the blood. At present the question is asked sotto voce, the time is surely coming when it will ring through Europe. But for the moment there is a still larger question at stake.
The publication of the Royal Commission's Report is a warning and a challenge to the democracy, not only of Great Britain, but of the world. It tells them that the real, the enduring enemy, is not the German, the Briton, the Frenchman, or the Russian. The enemy is not on the battlefield, but in the homeland, in the street, perhaps in the house. He has invaded every country in Europe without exception. Battleships, heavy ordnance, elaborate trenches, are of no avail. Treaties of peace cannot be made effective until they are signed between a vigilant and victorious democracy on the one hand and a defeated, privileged class on the other.
The national resources required to meet a foul disease are taken from us to-day in measure beyond precedent to meet an expenditure for which the demand was created by kings and statesmen. There was no reference to the will of the people; until such time as that will could be neither logical nor effective. The world's working men, decimated to satisfy the ambitions of their misrulers, must return in greatly diminished numbers and with lives crippled and wasted by the million, to find the old enemies at their gate and the worst and ugliest of these enemies prepared to take advantage of peace by waging more deadly war. And those who will administer their shattered dynasties will include members of families that are notoriously tainted by "social disease." Surely viler prospect were hard to find.