a
general rule--they may find that, after all, they do not wish to marry.
Yet the girl's mother, an imprudent prude, may often in this and other
cases do her utmost to bring the marriage about, not because she is
convinced that it means her daughter's highest welfare and happiness,
but because prudery dictates that her daughter must marry the man with
whom she has been so frequently seen; hence very likely lifelong
unhappiness, and worse.

Society, from the highest to the lowest of its strata, is afflicted with
certain forms of understood and eminently preventable disease, about
which not a word has been spoken in Parliament for twenty years, and any
public mention of which by mouth or pen involves serious risk of various
kinds. Here it is perhaps not necessary for us to consider the case of
the outcast, and of the diseases with which, poor creature, she is first
infected, and which she then distributes into our homes. Our present
concern is simply to point out that prudery, again, is largely
responsible for the continuance of these evils at a time when we have so
much precise knowledge regarding their nature and the possibility of
their prevention. Medical science cannot make distinctions between one
disease and another, nor between one sin and another, as prudery does.
Prudery says that such and such is vice, that its consequences in the
form of disease are the penalties imposed by its abominable god upon the
guilty and the innocent, the living and the unborn alike, and that
therefore our ordinary attitude towards disease cannot here be
maintained. Physiological science, however, knowing what it knows
regarding food and alcohol, and air and exercise and diet, can readily
demonstrate that the gout from which Mrs. Grundy suffers is also a
penalty for sin; none the less because it is not so hideously
disproportionate, in its measure and in its incidence, to the gravity of
the offence. These moral distinctions between one disease and another
have little or no meaning for medical science, and are more often than
not immoral.

It would be none too easy to show that the medical profession in any
country has yet used its tremendous power in this direction.
Professions, of course, do not move as a whole, and we must not expect
the universal laws of institutions to find an exception here. But though
they do not move, they can be moved. It is when the public has been
educated in the elements of these matters, and has been taug