These pages may disgust or offend nine hundred and ninety-nine readers out of a thousand. They may yet save one girl, and will have justified themselves. One final word may be added on the relation of this subject to Eugenics, to which this pen and voice have been for many years devoted. The subject of venereal disease is one of which we Eugenists, like the rest of the world, fight shy; yet just because the rest of the world does so, we should not. Nevertheless I mean to see to it that this subject becomes part of the Eugenic campaign which will yet dominate and mould the future. For surely the present spectacle has elements in it which would be utterly farcical if they were not so tragic. Here we have life present and life to come being destroyed for lack of knowledge. These horrible diseases, ravaging the guilty and the innocent, equally and indifferently, are at present allowed to do so with scarcely a voice raised against them. Every day husbands infect their wives, who have no kind of protection or remedy, and the wicked, grinning face of the law looks on, and says "She is his wife; all is well." If we had courage instead of cowardice--the capital mark of an age that has no organ voice but many steam whistles--we could accelerate incalculably the gradual decrease of these diseases. The body of eugenic opinion which is being made and multiplied might succeed in allying the Church and Medicine and the Law, with splendid and lasting effect. But we spend thousands of pounds in estimating correlations between hair colour and conscientiousness, fertility and longevity, stature and the number of domestic servants, and so forth, meanwhile protesting against too hasty attempts to guide public opinion on these refined matters; and this tremendous eugenic reform, which awaits the emergence of some courage somewhere, is left altogether out of account. There was no allusion to the existence of venereal disease, far and away the most appalling of what I have called dysgenic forces, in any official eugenic publication until April, 1909, when in the Eugenics Review we dared to make a cautious and half-ashamed beginning; half-ashamed to stand up against syphilis and gonorrh[oe]a. When one thinks of the things that we are not ashamed to do, as individuals or as nations, it is to reflect that perhaps we have "let the tiger die" too utterly, and that just as woman is ceasing to be a mammal, man is perhaps ceasing to be even a vertebrate. Is there no Archbishop or Principal of a University or Chief Justice or popular novelist or preacher or omnipotent editor, boasting a backbone still, who will serve not only his day and generation but all future days and generations, by devoting himself and his powers to this long-delayed campaign wherein, if it be but undertaken, success is certain, and reward so glorious?[14] CHAPTER XVI ON CHOOSING A HUSBAND