There is a greater penalty than this attached to the disease. The germs of the disease often attack the eyes of children of parents one or both of whom are afflicted with the disease. Twenty-five percent of all cases of blindness are attributed to gonorrhea. This blindness of children is one of the by-products of a disease casually dismissed as “no worse than a cold.” Syphilis, the other chief venereal disease, has been called by eugenists one of the racial poisons. Any competent medical treatise will go into details concerning its three stages, its powerful hold, once contracted, and the details of symptoms and the long, painful and expensive method of cure. We will only point out that it causes general debility, affects every tissue and organ, causes skin and bone diseases, as well as arterial diseases. In its later stages it produces paralysis, blindness, deafness, disorders of speech, mental enfeeblement, and locomotor ataxia (a wasting disease of the spinal cord). And this does not exhaust the list. The penalty of careless pleasure is costly. Fortunately, the governments of the world are now taking a hand in eradicating this worst of all diseases. In its first stages, a cure is comparatively sure; in the later stages, the case is often hopeless. VII. IDEALISM. _Chastity._—The average mind defines chastity as abstinence; in this sense, lifelong chastity is, in most cases, a perversion. The dictionary defines it as “pure from all unlawful sexual intercourse.” This gives rise to the question as to what is unlawful. Charlotte Perkins Gilman has accurately defined chastity, “not abstinence, but selection.” In this sense, chastity is a virtue. Most intelligent persons are willing to recognize that our moral standards are changing. They are changing now at a greater rate than they have for the last thousand years. Woman is responsible. It has taken that long and longer for her to acquire enough inner power to set on foot the forces that could liberate her from her world-wide subjection to man and his laws. Now the forces have been liberated, and the woman of the future will be a freer, finer and better rounded human being than the woman of the dark past was. She has acquired education, a share in the knowledge of the universe in which she lives. She has acquired a sounder body, more fit to bear strong children. She has acquired a strong, well-functioning mind, thereby giving a better heritage of mental aptitude to her offspring, and thereby making herself more fit as a mother to help them in their formative years. She has acquired at least a partial control over the essential purse-strings. She can no longer be bought and sold as a horse. She has at last managed to toss aside the old double standard of morality. Now she can demand of her mate either complete monogamy for both, or her right to share in whatever laxity he demands.