Moreover, sexual intercourse which is bought and sold has no relation to love. As a mode of gratifying the sex instinct it stands even lower in the moral scale than the habit of self-abuse. And any man who makes use of prostitution becomes an accomplice in creating this miserable class of outcasts whom we speak of as “unfortunates.” In short, whoremongery and prostitution are a social cancer, and therefore in the highest degree immoral. They furnish an instance of the manner in which money corrupts our whole civilisation. This corrupting influence, with its robbery of one man by another, makes itself felt in every department of life, and is exercised by every form of private capital. The climax of immorality in the cult of Mammon is reached, however, by the capital employed in maintaining the two great evils of alcohol and prostitution, both of which act as bloodsuckers upon the vitality of the individual, the race, and all that is holiest in men. These two forms of capital work hand in hand, fashioning the goddess of love in the likeness of a lewd, sordid harlot, with the man as at once her ravisher and her victim. They are also the worst enemies of our descendants, whose procreation is often undertaken in a moment of intoxication, and whose lives are exposed to the risk of alcoholic degeneration or venereal disease! These, therefore, are the chief foes of sexual morality: the struggle for wealth (as exemplified in the domination of private capital) and the use of alcohol. Let us combat both in the name of ethics. “_In hoc signo vincemus!_” * * * * * The following will, I hope, make my meaning still clearer. In sexual ethics many diseases and abnormalities play, of course, a great part. First of all there are the venereal diseases, and particularly syphilis and gonorrhœa, which often destroy family happiness and endanger the offspring. It is too often forgotten that chronic gonorrhœa can poison marriage, and that decay of the spinal marrow (locomotor ataxia) and the so-called softening of the brain (progressive or general paralysis) are nothing else than a very late result of syphilis, appearing from ten to twenty years after infection. In a brief statistical discussion of the question, based upon medical information, I have shown that seventy-five per cent of venereal infections are acquired while in a state of alcoholic excitement. In the vast majority of these cases the infection is communicated by means of prostitution, which, as the result of the incredibly numerous and varied sex relationships of the women, serves simply as a vast manufactory of venereal diseases.