“The relentless character of syphilitic diseases stands out in painful relief in its transmission from parent to offspring. Here it is, indeed, that the children’s teeth are set on edge, because the fathers have eaten sour grapes. The contaminated husband or wife is left through years of childlessness or of successive bereavements to mourn over early follies, and to repent when repentance is fruitless. The syphilitic man or woman can hardly become the parent of a healthy child.
“A young man has imbibed the contagion; it has become constitutional. After a few weeks, or months perhaps, of treatment, the visible signs of the disease no longer torment him. He has contracted a matrimonial alliance, and soon marries a healthy and virtuous woman. He flatters himself that he is cured. A few months suffice to give him painful proof of his error, for then his growing hopes of paternity are suddenly blasted. Instead of the child of his hopes he sees a shriveled and leprous corpse. This is but the first in a series of similar misfortunes. He has poisoned the fruit of his loins, and again and again, and still again, it falls withered and dead. At length nature seems to have triumphed over this foe to domestic happiness, and the parents’ hearts are gladdened by the sight of a living child. Their joy is short-lived. The child is feeble and sickly, and in a few days or weeks another death is added to the penance list of the humbled and grieving father.
“This mournful story will need no essential changes in the narration, should the poison of impure intercourse, legitimate or illicit, linger in the veins of the mother.
“A child of such a connection may be born in apparent health, but before six months have passed, some one of the numerous forms of infantile syphilis will be likely to appear and threaten its life. In the contest which follows between disease and the treatment, the physician is commonly victorious, but the contest is in many cases protracted, and often it is to be renewed again and again. And after all, it is not believed that children thus tainted at their birth often grow up and acquire that degree of health and vigor which is popularly ascribed to a good constitution.
“These are facts familiar to physicians practicing in large towns. But the history of inherited syphilis is not complete. If, in the case just recited, the wife escape contamination from her husband and her unborn child, yet the sad consequences of that husband’s folly are not yet exhausted. That tainted child, now a sickly nursling at her breast, has a venom in its ulcerated lips which can inoculate the mother with its own loathsome poison, while it draws its sustenance from the sacred fountain of infantile life. But this is not all. These little innocents sometimes spread their disease through the whole circle of those who bestow on them their care and kindness. The contagion spreads through the use of the same spoon, the same linen, and even by that highest token of affection, a kiss. It has been known that a single diseased child has contaminated its mother, a hired nurse, and, through that nurse, the nurse’s child, and, in addition to these, the husband’s mother and the mother’s sister. Such are sometimes the weighty consequences of a single error.
“PREVENTION.
“That the great source of the venereal poison is prostitution, requires no argument. The first question, then, to be answered, is, Can prostitution be prevented? In answering this question, it is necessary to remember that the history of the world demonstrates the existence of this vice in all ages, and among all nations, since the day its first pages were written. The appetite which incites it has always been stronger than moral restraints—stronger than the law. No rigor of punishment, no violence of public denunciation; neither exile, nor the dungeon, nor yet the disgusting malady with which nature punishes the practice has ever effected its extermination, even for a single year. Great as this evil has always been, it can not be denied that in our own time some of the accidents of what is called the progress of society tend, at least in large towns, greatly to increase it. The expenses of living are every where the great obstacle to early marriages, whether such expenses be positively necessary or be demanded by the social position of the individual, the fashion of his class, and therefore become relatively necessary. Wherever these expenses increase more rapidly than the rewards of labor, marriage becomes impossible for a constantly increasing number, or can only be purchased at the price of social position. But abstinence from marriage does not abolish or moderate the natural appetites. The great law of nature on which the existence of the race depends is not abrogated by any artificial state of society. Moral or religious principles will restrain its operations in some; human laws in some; the fear of consequences in some; yet there always have been, and probably always will be, many of both sexes who are not restrained by any of these considerations. These have sustained, and probably will continue to sustain, not only prostitution but houses of prostitution, in the face of every human law. Suppressed in one form, it immediately assumes another. Again pursued, it retreats to hiding-places where darkness and secrecy protect it from the pursuer.
“Severe penalties have heretofore only increased the evils of prostitution. If a hundred women are consigned to prison for this vice to-day, before a month has elapsed a hundred more have taken their places, and the hundred, though punished, are not reformed. Impelled by a love of their profession, or some by the passion to emulate the more fortunate of their sex in the finery of dress (a passion which first occasioned their fall), many by want, and all by a sense that they are outcasts, they are no sooner liberated than they return with new zeal to the life from which they have been detained only by force. Severe laws compel secrecy; they can do no more. When prostitution is criminal, disease, if known to others, is a practical conviction. Under such circumstances the contaminated will be slow to confess disease, and so subject themselves to punishment. Yet their passions and their necessities alike forbid even temporary abstinence. They spread disease without limit.
“Under this fact lies an important thought. Were it no more disgraceful to contract syphilis than it is to have fever and ague, the diseased would seek early relief, which is nearly equivalent to certain relief, and the disorder would soon be confined to the pitiable few who have lost in drunkenness and misery the instinctive dread of all that is foul and disgusting in personal disease. Prostitution, it is true, would then be restored to its old Roman dignity, yet venereal disease could then be reached, and all but eradicated. But a respectable syphilis does not belong to our age and nation. It lost caste in the beginning, and its exploits in modern times have not been of a character to win it friends. The supposition aims only to show, by contrast, the evils of well-intended, but probably injudicious legislation. Regarding pains and penalties: if the whip, confiscation, and banishment, in the hands of Charlemagne and St. Louis, aided by a right good will and all the powers of a military despotism, could not suppress prostitution, or even prevent the opening of houses of prostitution; if penal laws in Europe, from the days of these earnest princes until now, have utterly failed of their object, as they notoriously have, it is fair to ask how much more can prohibitory laws accomplish in a country where the right of private judgment and personal liberty in speech and action are the very foundation of the body politic? They have hitherto been ineffectual. In spite of such laws, the vice is increasing. In consequence of such laws, its most enormous physical evil is extending its baleful influence through every rank and circle of society. It is still emphatically the plague of the poor; it still brings sorrow and misery to the firesides of the affluent and titled.
“A utopian view of the perfectibility of man might look for the remedy to this evil in universal early marriages, in domestic happiness, and in a universal moral sense which will compel men and women to keep their marriage vows. But, taking man as he is, we find the tides of society set with constantly increasing strength against early marriages; that domestic happiness is not synonymous with marriage, whether early or late; and that the moral sense which should teach all men to observe even their solemn promises would be miraculous. For these things the law has done all that has been thought wise to attempt, probably all that it can do.