The dangers environing those accustomed to consort with harlots exist to almost the same degree where a single private mistress is employed. To say nothing of the expense of supporting such, usually much greater than that of honestly building a family, there must always exist the fact that the woman who permits one man to unlawfully use her will be very likely to grant similar favors to his friend or any one else who may please her fancy or offer her her price; and then comes the chance of her receiving and imparting disease. Many men think that all such risk is avoided in the case of deliberate seduction. Such, however, is by no means always the case. The popular spread of physiological knowledge has been productive of many unforeseen results. Many women, as well as many men, imagine that by the observance of certain precautions they can do as they please with a friend without possible chance of discovery; the result of all which is, that, in many instances of intercourse with supposed virgins, the biter is sorely bitten, and repents him at his leisure. Where true seduction is effected, not only is the offender oppressed by a life-long sense of the wrong he has done, but he must also feel that the prize thus unfairly gained is liable at any moment to slip from his grasp, or to prove to him the veriest apple of Sodom. Thus disappointed, or thus fearing, many, even of adult age, resort to what is physiologically a worse crime against nature—self-excitation. This yielded to in boyhood sometimes makes of the young man a woman pursuer, but probably more often a woman hater; while, on the other hand, it is often the last and final resort of the old and broken-down debauchee. In either event the effect upon the constitution is detrimental in the extreme. It is customary, but still a grave error, to preserve silence upon this subject. “But,” to apply to it the brave words of my friend Dr. Shrady, of New York, when discussing prostitution, “notwithstanding our prejudices of education, agitation will here, as in the kindred question of pre-natal infanticide, finally culminate in reform.”[25] If the subject is decided, as I believe will be the case, to be of the importance that is claimed by every philosophical physician who has looked into the matter, a voice will go out into every corner of the land, caught up and re-echoed by all the medical men thereof, that will cause those who care either for their souls or their bodies, to pause and tremble.