The case of pure air as against contaminated air is but one way of putting the general case of cleanness against foulness. Bad air has the same vices that attach to dirt in other forms; one of the uses of more knowledge is to be able to detect dirt in all forms, however concealed or disguised; and another is to discover the best means of sweeping it away. Our ancestors used to drink water from pools and wells that were sinks of organic filth, to worship in churches built over an array of corpses in all stages of putrefaction, to wear the same suit of leather clothes, day and night, till they fell apart or the wearer outgrew them—all because they knew no better. They had no conception of the disgust with which such habits were to be regarded by a more educated posterity. Now the golden rule of health is “Wash you—make you clean!” It is not enough to make, or even to keep, the children’s faces clean; we must look no less to the cleanness of the lung passages, of the alimentary canal—yes, of mind and heart also.
Morally and esthetically, there is nothing in relation to which the duty to be clean is more stringent than the reproductive function. The source of the greatest work in all God’s creation, the human race, ought more than all else to be pure; and the necessary condition of our endowing the earth in coming ages with a better human race than it now has, or has ever had, is that we provide that coming race with the best kind of parentage. The quality of the next generation is determined by the quality of this generation; it will be in most respects as we make it, clean if brought forth in purity, foul if engendered in foulness. And the truth so strikingly evident in the moral and esthetical view is even more clear in the view we are here taking, that of the race’s health. To sexual impurity, by the testimony of the best physicians—the illustrious Dr. Osler for instance—more physical degeneration is due than to any other one cause. Dr. Prince A. Morrow, president of the Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, estimates the number constantly ill from syphilis in this country—although that number has of late been considerably reduced—as still no less than 2,000,000. The syphilitic poison is communicated by inoculation—a contagion that has no danger for us so long as held at a respectful distance; and the essential point in guarding against it is to preserve that distance. Like the venom of the rattlesnake it is best known in a knowledge of its lurking places. It was first recognized in Europe, some time in the fifteenth century; and it came from the Orient, not of its own initiative, but because Europeans went after it and fetched it. Similarly now, a man does not have it unless he goes after it. There is nothing in the whole range of human disorders that shows more emphatically than this, the feebleness and inadequacy of the best possible cure as compared with prevention. Knowledge seems all that is needed for complete prevention; any young man, having more than the resolution and self-control of an infant or an idiot, ought to require nothing more than an elementary acquaintance with a few facts that should be at the command of every instructor of youth, to insure his leaving the syphilis and gonorrhea factory permanently alone. If their baleful function were made clearly known to those who most need to know it, the entrance door to every such temple of moral and physical ruin would carry to the eyes the sign that greeted those of Dante: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here”—a prospect whose unrelieved blackness looks even darker when contrasted with the brilliant glory of the hope relinquished. It is a law of our human constitution that the richest, deepest, keenest joys that life has for us are those that come from the contrast of two sexes. Even when that contrast is hostile, there seems to be some pleasure in it; but immeasurably more when it is an incident of ardent attraction. Byron in one of his earlier poems thus puts it:
“Devotion wafts the mind above,
But Heaven itself descends in love;
A feeling from the Godhead caught,
To wean from self each sordid thought;
A ray of Him who formed the whole;
A glory circling ’round the soul!”
It is too well known that the poet’s own loves, in after years, were not always of this ideal quality; but no one ever better set forth the exalted possibilities of the sex sentiment, to which the continuance of life on earth is due. But the worst, we are often reminded, is the corruption of the best, and it is another possibility of the same sentiment that it may urge a man to blast his whole future by incurring an incurable disease, and sadder yet—too often to involve others, tender and innocent lives, in his own condemnation. If more knowledge can ward off such a grisly fate, it is surely inhuman cruelty not to supply that knowledge, however disagreeable the duty may appear. When clearly seen as a duty it will be no longer disagreeable.
While making this call for more knowledge of vital truths primarily on account of the young men, since it is in the vast majority of cases the man who tempts, the man to whom the outcast woman owes her fall, it would be the wildest folly to stop with one-half of the rising generation. The future of the race is too dependent on its mothers to excuse or permit the neglect of any preparation of them for motherhood, which health in its fullest sense may demand.