The speed, however, with which the disease thus travelled from the south of Europe to its western confines has been often employed as an argument to show that the contagion of syphilis was propagated at its first introduction by laws different from those which now regulate its communication. In other words, it has been often alleged that the disease was then spread from kingdom to kingdom, and from city to city, by epidemic influences and by general contagion, and not merely by the slower medium of impure sexual connection. We have just seen such a doctrine so far belied by the sagacious regulations of the magistrates of Aberdeen; and when we look to the then existing state of Society, both on the Continent and in our own country, to the loose manners and licentious lives of these times, we shall probably find a sufficient solution of the, at first sight, difficult problem of the rapid dissemination of the new malady. The morals of the general mass of the people are ever found to be principally regulated by the example set before them by the aristocracy and clergy. At the date of the introduction of syphilis into Europe, the notorious habits of the two latter ruling bodies were assuredly such as to expedite greatly the diffusion of the new scourge that had sprung up among them; and hence, at its first outbreak, we find the disease fixing itself upon several of the highest members of the continental courts, and of the church. The Emperor Charles V., and Pope Alexander VI., kings and cardinals, princes and bishops, peers and priests, are openly and publicly recorded among its victims by those who personally watched and described the first ravages of syphilis. In fact the disease was then scarcely, or indeed not at all, looked upon as conferring any degree of infamy.