they are basing their moral standard, if I may put it so, on bed-rock; they _are_ animals, and therefore they behave as animals without violating any law of their being. As they rise higher in the scale of evolution their morals become nobler. There are moral standards among the lower animals, but they remain at a certain level, and rightly so. No animal is harmed by behaving like an animal, for in doing so he obeys the law of his being; but if human beings behave as though they were animals, what happens? They find to their horror that they have let loose upon the world detestable, hideous and devastating diseases. Do you think that medicine will ever be able to rid the world of what are called the diseases of immorality as long as immorality remains? I do not believe it. I know that you can do much for individual sufferers, though you cannot do one-tenth part of what doctors thought they were going to be able to do, eight or nine years ago. And, of course, whatever we can do, we must and ought to do. But we do not reach the root of the matter by medicine. No scientist can tell us how small-pox or tuberculosis or rheumatism first entered the world; but any scientist can tell us that by wrong living, wrong housing, wrong feeding, we can breed and spread and perpetuate disease. In other words, we are diseased not because we obey the laws of our nature but because we violate them: and though we can take the individual sufferer and (sometimes) cure him, we shall not get rid of the disease until we have learnt to obey those laws and to live rightly. In just the same way the diseases of vice, though no one can say how they first came into the world, continue and flourish, not because of human nature, but because we violate some law of our own nature in what we do. We may even cure the individual; we may see a thousand struck and a thousand guilty escape; the fact remains that these diseases are bred in the swamp of immorality, just as certainly as malaria is bred in the mosquito-haunted pools of the malaria swamp. Drain the swamp, and you get rid of the malaria, for there is no longer any place for the malaria-bearing mosquito to breed. Drain the swamp of immorality, and you get rid of venereal disease, because there is no longer a place where these diseases can breed. Live rightly, and your nature will respond in health. When human beings elect to make their relations with one another promiscuous--when, that is to say, they treat themselves as animals--they are not obeying, they are violating the law of their own being; for they are not animals only, and to treat themselves as such is to disobey the law of their own nature. And disobedience reacts in disease.