ion on Venereal Disease, and Sir William Osier, who was a
great authority, said that he could teach medicine on syphilis
alone, because every tissue in the body is affected by it, and that
the diseases of blindness, deafness, insanity and every form of
disease may be due to syphilis. You have only to consider the
effect that it had upon the army, and I understand that more than
two army corps were invalided during the war on account of venereal
disease. What have you to say to that? Does not that create some
anxiety?"

It is difficult even to read this eloquent appeal--the more eloquent
perhaps because it was quite unpremeditated--without being deeply moved.
Yet the witnesses opposing Sir Frederick Mott were apparently unaffected.
Of them, as of men of old, it might justly be said:--

"He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they
should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart,
and be converted."

And now large numbers of hospitals all over the Empire are issuing appeals
for the means to treat venereal disease.

"It is tragic," says one London hospital, "to see the
sufferers--men, women and even little children--innocent little
mites, knowing not from what they suffer or why they should. It is
thought by many that venereal disease is a sign of guilt, but large
numbers of our patients are innocent victims."

Is it not time then that we all stopped repeating timid platitudes about
making vice safe, and did something practical to _make marriage safe?_

_Why don't we?_

Is it because we are afraid to define the terms we use so glibly? We talk
of promoting chastity, for example. _What is chastity?_ Surely chastity is
happy, healthy sexual intercourse between a man and a woman who love one
another; and unchastity is sexual intercourse between those who do _not_
love one another. No sexual intercourse at all is neither chastity nor
unchastity; it is the negation of both, and it ends in extinction. Why
trouble so much about a negation that inevitably means racial death? Why
not devote ourselves to life and love; to the building of a happy healthy
human family--a family that instinctively realises that the clean
blood-stream of a nation is its most priceless possession?

But the national blood-stream can never be clean until there is a complete
knowledge of sexual control and sanitation among all of us, and