on by drink and poverty. The prostitute class is
largely recruited from mentally and morally deficient girls, who are
themselves the offspring of syphilitic or alcoholic parents. Prostitution
is the effect--not the cause--of anti-social acts and conditions. We must
remedy the causes of these before we can hope to remove the effects. Under
present social conditions, attempting to abolish prostitution by shutting
up tolerated houses is just as idle as attempting to lower the temperature
of a room by smashing the thermometer. All we can do is to make and keep
these women clean. If we decline to do even that, then diseased women will
succeed in contaminating our men much faster than we can instruct the men
in sexual cleanliness.[B]

[Footnote B: Diseased women will continue to cater for men so long as they
are left free to do so, but as knowledge grows their clients will tend to
be limited to _diseased men_. Once men clearly understand that _every_
casual connection is a risk of disease, they will certainly tend to run
fewer risks.--E.A.R.]

And again, just as the medical prevention of venereal disease was not
proposed, and has not been applied for the purpose of fostering or
condoning promiscuous intercourse,[C] so the conscious control of
fecundity by contraception must not be applied in such a way as to lessen
the proportion of well-born citizens in the nation taken as a whole.
Birth-control applied only by the responsible classes of the community
combined with indiscriminate fecundity among the irresponsible masses,
must inevitably lead to the lowering of the general average in character,
brains and physique. It is a form of reverse selection--the responsible
being out-bred by the irresponsible. What is wanted is the general
application of birth-control by voluntary contraception, and the
particular application of voluntary and compulsory sterilisation of the
feeble-minded and unfit.

[Footnote C: My own experience among the troops quite convinced me that
the more thoroughly and carefully self-disinfection was taught, the less
immorality there was. It was impossible to teach self-disinfection
properly without at the same time instilling a living sense of danger into
the minds of men and women; and this danger-sense certainly led to more
self-restraint.--E.A.R.]

Enthusiastic advocates of birth-control claim it as a means of _improving
the race_. It is not necessarily anything of the kind. You cannot improve
a flock