al 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
chasti