“Oh, these modern doctors!” she cried. “I never heard of such ideas!”
I could not help smiling. “My dear Mrs. Tuis, what do you imagine you know about the prevalence of gonorrhea? Consider just one fact—that I heard a college professor state publicly that in his opinion eighty-five per cent. of the men students at his university were infected with some venereal disease. And that is the pick of our young manhood—the sons of our aristocracy!”
“Oh, that can’t be!” she exclaimed. “People would know of it!
“Who are ‘people’? The boys in your family know of it—if you could get them to tell you. My two sons studied at a State university, and they would bring me home what they heard—the gossip, the slang, the horrible obscenity. Fourteen fellows in one dormitory using the same bathroom—and on the wall you saw a row of fourteen syringes! And they told that on themselves, it was the joke of the campus. They call the disease a ‘dose’; and a man’s not supposed to be worthy the respect of his fellows until he’s had his ‘dose’—the sensible thing is to get several, till he can’t get any more. They think it’s ‘no worse than a bad cold’; that’s the idea they get from the ‘clap-doctors,’ and the women of the street who educate our sons in sex matters.”
“Oh, spare me, spare me!” cried Mrs. Tuis. “I beg you not to force these horrible details upon me!”
“That is what is going on among our boys,” I said. “The Castleman boys, the Chilton boys! It’s going on in every fraternity house, every ‘prep school’ dormitory in America. And the parents refuse to know, just as you do!”
“But what could I possibly do, Mrs. Abbott?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Tuis. What I am going to do is to teach the young girls.”
She whispered, aghast, “You would rob the young girls of their innocence. Why, with their souls full of these ideas their faces would soon be as hard—oh, you horrify me!”
“My daughter’s face is not hard,” I said. “And I taught her. Stop and think, Mrs. Tuis—ten thousand blind children every year! A hundred thousand women under the surgeon’s knife! Millions of women going to pieces with slowly creeping diseases of which they never hear the names! I say, let us cry this from the housetops, until every woman knows—and until every man knows that she knows, and that unless he can prove that he is clean he will lose her! That is the remedy, Mrs. Tuis!”