These words need no comment. But can we imagine any form of the evil here indicated more fit than that embodied in these Acts to produce the pernicious consequences described, and to lead men back from manhood into babyhood? For by these Acts it is implied that men are so helplessly the slaves of their own lower passions, so little in possession of the gift of self-control, so little fit to manage themselves, that they must needs be protected from the consequences of their own unnecessary vice, and taught to lean upon this great centralizing and protecting authority, in place of on the help of God and a resolute and manly will. II. The Contagious Diseases Acts have been introduced into England solely on medical grounds. They have been argued for by their supporters solely on medical grounds, and every attempt has been continually made to restrict the question to a medical question. Yet the continual of the opposition on the immoral tendencies of the Acts, and the generally evinced and growing determination of the country at large to treat the question as a moral question, and to regard that question as of primary importance in comparison with the medical question—all this has brought about a very significant change in the position taken up by the supporters of the Acts, who now attempt to make out that their tendencies are highly moral, as perhaps they may endeavour, after reading the arguments advanced in this Essay, to make them out to be highly constitutional. They have openly boasted in and out of Parliament that more has been achieved by their salaried police and medical officers than has ever been accomplished by the unwearying efforts of Christian societies and independent workers, and that their achievements in the matter of spiritual influence and moral conversions have dwarfed all that has ever been recorded in the annals of Christian evangelization in this direction.[79] Similarly they will no doubt by and by show with equal success that the system which they have introduced is a bulwark of our constitutional liberties, in comparison of which Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus Act, and Jury Trial have been lamentable and conspicuous failures.