The ignorance prevailing about the dangers of venereal diseases is also responsible for the levity with which marriages with profligates are contracted. By a strange irony of fate, the diseases of vice, transplanted to the bed of virtue, often become intensified in virulence. Still with many girls the man who has most promiscuously and profusely scattered his “wild oats” has been looked upon as the most favored one among possible husbands. How there can be anything alluring to marry a man with a past, when there is the great peril that the young bride may get up on the morning after the wedding-day an invalid for life, can only be explained by the lack of knowledge of the gravity of venereal diseases. If the mother knew that a man who has led an unclean life is not a safe husband for her daughter, if she were aware of the fact that dissipated men do not make desirable husbands, she would look more for virtue than money in the future son-in-law. If the girl knew the host of indeterminable lesions which may follow in the wake of various venereal diseases, if she knew all the dangers lurking for her and her offspring, she would never condone moral depravity in her husband and the father of her children. Her whole nature would revolt against the wedlock with a man whose body is a sink of corruption. It will be she who will have to suffer most. It is upon the woman that the burden of shame and suffering, of disease and death, is chiefly laid. The danger of sexual exploitation of young girls by certain men is much greater, the less the girls are instructed about the social dangers and the physiological consequences of a chance acquaintance. The girl ought to be taught that one mistake blasts a young girl’s life. Let a young woman stray but once from the path of virtue, or let there be even one breath of suspicion against her virtue, whether well founded or not, and there is no forgiveness to her in this world. She has suffered an irretrievable loss. Her greatest enemy in such a case is woman herself. Society admits the acknowledged libertine to its most exclusive circles, but forever ostracises the woman whose one false step has been found out. The man may emerge from the mire of dissipation without a spot or blemish upon his character, for the woman, there is no return. Shame and degradation follow her even to the grave. If the girl further knew the physiological consequences of her transgression, if she knew that she may become gravid, and thus publish to the world her folly, such cases as are often seen in maternity hospitals of girls between the ages of twelve to fifteen years being already pregnant, without knowing the sex relation, would never be met with.[BS] Many of these girls have no adequate idea of the result of congressus, because no one has told them.