hly infectious and exceedingly
destructive diseases, syphilis and gonorrhea, known in medical science
as venereal or social. When these are acquired by individuals guilty of
sexual promiscuity, they seriously and often fatally affect the victim;
but of far greater social-hygienic importance is the medical evidence
that they are very often transmitted to persons innocent of any
transgression of the moral law, especially to wives and children.

The medical revelations concerning the relation of sexual immorality to
the plague of social diseases, has come from certain eminent
physicians, notably the late Dr. Prince A. Morrow. His translation of
Fournier's "Syphilis and Marriage" (1881), his own "Social Diseases and
Marriage" (1904), and several of his pamphlets published by the
American Society of Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, have been
authoritative statements of conditions as the medical world sees them.

[Sidenote: Social diseases and immorality.]

The extent of social diseases is a fairly accurate measure of the
minimum amount of immorality, for nothing is better established in
medical science than that promiscuity in sexual relations is directly
or indirectly responsible for spread of the microorganisms which cause
the diseases. If for several generations all men and women limited
their sexual relations to monogamic marriage, and the relatively rare
cases of non-sexual and prenatal infection were treated so as to render
them non-contagious, the social diseases would probably disappear from
the human family. Such a statement is significant only in showing the
relation of social diseases to sexual promiscuity, for of course, there
is no reasonable hope that the venereal germs will ever be annihilated
by universal monogamy.

[Sidenote: Attack by education and sanitation.]

Reduction of the amount of venereal disease must depend upon (1)
hygienic and moral education which will lead people to avoid the
sources of infection and (2) sanitary and medical science which works
either by applying antiseptic or other prophylactic methods for
preventing development of the causative microorganisms, or by using
germicides for destroying those germs which have already produced
disease. Thus the educational and the sanitary attack on the social
diseases lie parallel. Both are needed, for, even with all the possible
methods of attack, the progress against these diseases will be
exceedingly slow.

Those who are interested in the