Read Ebook: Safe Marriage: A Return to Sanity by Rout Ettie Annie Lane William Arbuthnot Sir Commentator

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An old family doctor, then with a colonial ambulance, wrote:--

"Many women ... will owe their health and happiness to you, and not a few will be indebted to you for their lives."

ALCOHOLISM.

As with young men, so with young girls: a few glasses of wine taken at a supper or a dance--and the first downward step is taken, not because any wrong was intended, but the simple actualities of sex were unknown, and the stimulant took advantage of the ignorance that is miscalled innocence. This kind of thing will continue till the older generation realise that morality depends--not on the maintenance of ignorance and the fear of disease, but on the spread of knowledge and the promotion of virtue.

It is not morality, but caution, that is developed by fear, and in this case caution is counteracted by the practical experience that many men are immoral without becoming diseased. One man commits many immoral acts and suffers not at all; another man becomes syphilitic by yielding for the very first time; the penalty is purely fortuitous. There is no necessary connection at all between immorality and disease. The dangers of sexual intercourse are due to dirt and promiscuity rather than to immorality, and in part to the physical conformation of the individual. Virtue has far deeper and more substantial foundations than the mere gusts of fear. It is founded on necessary and responsible guardianship of the very gates of life.

The medical formulae for venereal disease preventive ointments for men, and venereal disease preventive suppositories and ointments for women, should be decided upon, after thorough investigation and test, by the Departments of Public Health, and none other should be permitted to be sold. Printed directions should be issued, duly authorised by the Departments of Public Health, and no other directions should be supplied to the public with the venereal disease preventives. In these respects, to the best of my belief, the Division of Venereal Diseases of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, co-operating with the United States Public Health Service, will play the leading part; is, indeed, already doing so. Under the direction of Dr. Edward Martin, Commissioner of Health, and Dr. S. Leon Gans, Director, Division of Venereal Diseases, specimen tubes are tested and approved by the Health Laboratories of the Department; and certificates are issued to manufacturing chemists authorising the manufacture of ointments made in accordance with approved formulae. Requests are made officially by the Department to retail chemists and druggists to sell, and to medical practitioners to recommend, suitable venereal disease preventives to the general public in a proper manner. In time it will probably be found advisable to authorise only a standard type of tube--preferably the metal tube with elongated nozzle and expanded metal cap--filled with one simple self-disinfecting ointment.

We must all of us first learn to separate the moral from the medical campaign. Both are necessary, but they must be conducted independently. America is doing this; England is not. In England venereal disease is still officially regarded as something to be discussed; in America--as something to be destroyed. Thus America is winning and England losing the battle against the venereal microbe. The Overseas British Dominions will undoubtedly follow the lead of America--particularly that of Pennsylvania. Hence, these newer countries may have a glorious future, England--only a splendid past.

Apart from voluntary and compulsory treatment for venereal diseases, we certainly need voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the unfit--diseased and feeble-minded and otherwise unfit persons, who, whatever their other qualifications may be, are unsuitable as parents. But whatever operation is decided upon, for men and for women, must in no way interfere with ordinary sexual activity; otherwise it will be promptly turned down by the general public, no matter what its medical advocates may say. In marriage the partner to be sterilised is obviously the one who is unfit for parenthood.

With the moral and social aspects of birth-control there is no need to deal further, except to say that they have recently been endorsed in England, with fine grace and high authority, by Lord Dawson of Penn , in an address given before the Church Congress at Birmingham, on October 12th, 1921, which has since been republished by Messrs. Nisbet at a shilling, under the title of "Love--Marriage--Birth-Control." The following short extract may be quoted here:--

"Generally speaking," says Lord Dawson, "birth-control before the first child is inadvisable. On the other hand, the justifiable use of birth-control would seem to be to limit the number of children when such is desirable, and to spread out their arrival in such a way as to serve their true interests and those of their home."

As to the prevention of venereal disease, as I have said, what we must aim at is not merely the prevention of sin, but the prevention of the poisoning of the sinner; for, if not, we shall have blind babies, invalid wives, and ruined husbands: broken-hearted and broken-bodied mothers adding one fragment after another to the Nation's pile of damaged goods.

If not--if the immoral man cannot be made better but rather worse, much worse, by needlessly infecting him with syphilis, then clearly the ideals of beauty and duty demand that we should apply effective sexual sanitation to the Nation until such time as we are all, every one of us, free from venereal disease. That time is not yet--and this is the essence of the whole problem. But victory is within sight. When it comes--then, and not till then--sex will regain its soul of loveliness. To this end--

"Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell, That mind and soul, according well, May make one music as before, But vaster."

NOTE.

OTHER METHODS OF CONTRACEPTION.

NOTE.--The method of "self-control" is not referred to here, because one marital relationship per annum might lead to an annual child. In the matter of limitation of offspring, therefore, "self-control" has no value.

MEDICAL SUPPLIES.

Children may be taught any system of morals--sexual or other; Christian, Mahomedan, Hindoo, Papuan, or other. They are intensely imitative and acquire a bias towards local ideas of right and wrong through association with intimate companions. A bias once acquired tends to persist. For that reason parents choose good companions and schools. On the other hand, it is difficult or impossible to convert "hardened sinners," for example, adult non-Christians. Children, therefore, may be really taught; adults, as a rule, can only be preached at. Any man may test the truth of all this by examining his own consciousness. Would any amount of preaching cause him to change his present ideas of right and wrong? As little can he alter the bias of other men. As the twig is bent so the tree grows.

In various times and places, almost everything from promiscuous sexual intercourse to absolute abstinence from all intercourse has been held holy, or permissible, or damnable. Even among Christians the widest differences have prevailed as regards the local and contemporary tone. Among them, especially among the English speaking peoples, a convention forbids the familiar discussion of sexual matters between children and adults. This convention may be right or wrong. In any case it exists, and is likely to persist for ages. But a knowledge of sex is traditional among boys, and to some extent among girls of the school age. For good or evil, therefore, children are the real teachers of sexual morals in England. Children deal with the impressionable age and give the early bias. Adults stand aside, and teach only extreme reticence. The discussions of boys are often obscene. As a consequence vast numbers grow up with the idea that unchastity is a gallant adventure, or, at worst, only a peccadillo. Even in old age such men look back to past intrigues with satisfaction. After marriage another tradition, or bias, also taught by English boys, comes into action--the tradition to keep the plighted word, to "play the game." The great majority of married Englishmen, therefore, are chaste.

Judging from history, the world, and in particular England, is not more--or less--immoral to-day than at any time during the last 2000 years. During all that time children have taught and adults have preached. Doubtless there have been many campaigns of purity in the past--mere campaigns of preaching to adults. They were ineffectual and are forgotten. Epochs of licence have almost invariably followed epochs of austerity. Modern campaigns of purity never arise except as consequents on medical attempts to prevent venereal disease, and always cease when the attempt to procure sanitation has ceased. In effect, they have been merely campaigns to secure the poisoning of sinners and their victims.

The extent of current immorality may be judged from the prevalence of venereal disease. The Royal Commission of 1913-16 found that ten per cent. of the urban population suffered from syphilis. Eighty per cent. of the population of the United Kingdom is now urban, and gonorrhoea is six or seven times as prevalent as syphilis. It follows that at least every other person in the Kingdom has suffered from venereal disease. Probably not a family has escaped infection. In proportion to its prevalence syphilis is not very deadly, yet it has been reckoned as the fourth killing disease. The victims of gonorrhoea are incalculable. Venereal diseases fill our hospitals, asylums, and workhouses. They are the principal causes of heart disease, apoplexy, paralysis, insanity, blindness in children, and of that life of sterility and pain to which so many women are condemned. It is said that chastity is the only real safeguard against venereal disease. But this is always said by people who have never stirred a finger to teach chastity, but who have only preached it. At any time there are at least a million of perfectly innocent sufferers, principally women and children, in the United Kingdom.

During the war a disloyal faction in every Dominion endeavoured to prevent the sending of help to the Mother Country. A principal cry of this faction was, "Do not let us send our clean lads to that cesspool, England." England is more than the world-cesspool. Since Englishmen are the greatest travellers, she has been the principal source of infection for the world. At one time during the war the Australasian Governments threatened to withdraw their forces unless measures were taken to protect them.

When the German offensive was impending a sanitary method was published, so effective that the venereal rate was reduced from 92 to 15 per thousand per annum. The Government proposed to bring the method into general use in the Army, but was prevented by influences which preferred to see the country poisoned and the British Army defeated. While the opponents of sanitation sat snugly at home hundreds of thousands of British soldiers were killed or maimed, enormous material was lost with territory which other hundreds of thousands of brave men had died to win, the war was prolonged, thousands of millions were added to the National Debt, and half trained boys and elderly fathers of families were hurried into the firing line. At that time there were in hospitals or in depots, convalescent from venereal disease, enough fully-trained allied soldiers to furnish, not an army corps but a great army, complete almost from G.O.C. to trumpeter.

Fear of disease does not prevent immorality, as may be judged from the immense prevalence of venereal disorders. But it does drive baser characters to the pursuit and seduction of "decent" girls. In this way nearly all prostitutes begin their careers. Prostitutes are much more diseased than other women, who, though often diseased, are seldom suspected of disease. Yet, since it has been found statistically that three out of four men acquire their maladies from amateurs, it is manifest that prostitutes only hang on the fringe of a vaster immorality. Men, who know more of these diseases than women, are, on the average, much less chaste. Medical students who know most are not more moral than other men. Plainly venereal diseases are causes, not preventives, of immorality. Nothing, therefore, is gained from their prevalence except a flood of death, disability, and misery, which falls alike on the just and unjust.

During the war Sir Archdall Reid, employing very simple means, reduced the incidence of disease among the large body of troops in his charge almost to the vanishing point. He could not make them more moral, he did not make them less moral, but at any rate he preserved their services for the country in its hour of need. And he preserved their future wives and children from unmerited death and suffering. Other doctors were equally successful. The town authorities of Portsmouth and many other boroughs are about to employ these methods for the prevention of disease among the civil population. This book describes them and tells the story of the fight against a wicked and cruel fanaticism. Its policy is endorsed by many of the leading men and women in the Kingdom--members of both Houses of Parliament, town authorities, doctors, authors, sociologists and others.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY WOODS AND SONS, LTD., LONDON, N.1.

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