Safe Marriage | Page 4

but failing that we must cease wanting to poison the sinner. We must actively work to save him from the penalties of his folly, for that is the only way in which we can save his victims and succeed ultimately in "Making Marriage Safe."
Similarly every effort should be made to prevent women becoming diseased, no matter how immoral they may be. The prostitute is very often a woman of peculiar mentality or overdeveloped animal instincts; and many women are driven to prostitution by drink and poverty. The prostitute class is largely recruited from mentally and morally deficient girls, who are themselves the offspring of syphilitic or alcoholic parents. Prostitution is the effect--not the cause--of anti-social acts and conditions. We must remedy the causes of these before we can hope to remove the effects. Under present social conditions, attempting to abolish prostitution by shutting up tolerated houses is just as idle as attempting to lower the temperature of a room by smashing the thermometer. All we can do is to make and keep these women clean. If we decline to do even that, then diseased women will succeed in contaminating our men much faster than we can instruct the men in sexual cleanliness.[B]
[Footnote B: Diseased women will continue to cater for men so long as they are left free to do so, but as knowledge grows their clients will tend to be limited to diseased men. Once men clearly understand that every casual connection is a risk of disease, they will certainly tend to run fewer risks.--E.A.R.]
And again, just as the medical prevention of venereal disease was not proposed, and has not been applied for the purpose of fostering or condoning promiscuous intercourse,[C] so the conscious control of fecundity by contraception must not be applied in such a way as to lessen the proportion of well-born citizens in the nation taken as a whole. Birth-control applied only by the responsible classes of the community combined with indiscriminate fecundity among the irresponsible masses, must inevitably lead to the lowering of the general average in character, brains and physique. It is a form of reverse selection--the responsible being out-bred by the irresponsible. What is wanted is the general application of birth-control by voluntary contraception, and the particular application of voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the feeble-minded and unfit.
[Footnote C: My own experience among the troops quite convinced me that the more thoroughly and carefully self-disinfection was taught, the less immorality there was. It was impossible to teach self-disinfection properly without at the same time instilling a living sense of danger into the minds of men and women; and this danger-sense certainly led to more self-restraint.--E.A.R.]
Enthusiastic advocates of birth-control claim it as a means of _improving the race_. It is not necessarily anything of the kind. You cannot improve a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle by letting all the individuals breed; whether each individual has a small number or a large number of offspring makes comparatively little difference. The way to improve the flock or herd is to breed only from the best and eliminate the unfit as breeding material. Changes in environment may improve or deteriorate the individuals of one generation, but such changes are not inheritable, excepting in the case of venereal disease. Syphilis, e.g., may damage the germ-cells of a man's body, and thus lead to his procreating diseased and damaged offspring--idiots, imbeciles, mental or moral deficients, and so forth, who unfortunately are fertile. Thus the prevention of venereal disease is a eugenic force. It is in fact the only eugenic force in operation at present. Generally speaking, it is the well-developed and high-spirited and enterprising young men who travel most, and who, therefore, are most likely to contract and spread venereal disease. They come in contact with a much larger number of women than those who stay at home instead of wandering abroad. These well-to-do young travellers often marry the finest of our women, and later in life damage or sterilise them through latent or chronic venereal disease. Hence many one-child marriages--due not to the use of contraceptives, but to the action of the gonococcus transferred to the body of the wife.
But there is this hope. It is among the mentally alert and well-informed men and women that birth-control is first understood and applied, and it is among this very same class that the medical prevention of venereal disease is also first understood and applied. Thus, there will tend to be less disease among this class than among the mentally torpid and ill-informed masses of the community. This in itself will not improve the race, but it will prevent the deterioration of certain classes and increase their numbers. Nevertheless, so long as the irresponsible and feeble-minded and diseased are permitted to multiply indiscriminately, as at present, they