nd of the scale and
make men better; we must train young boys more in purity of life and
chastity BEFORE their passions become uncontrollable.

"Whereas the cry of every moralist and philanthropist is, 'Let us put
a stop to this prostitution, open and clandestine.' This cannot be
effected at present, much as it is to be desired; the demand for it is
too great, even possibly greater than the supply. If we wish to
eradicate it, we must go to the fountainhead and make those who create
the demand purer, so that, the demand falling off, the supply will be
curtailed."[C]

[Footnote C: _The Preservation of Health_, p. 161.]

To this I venture to add that by teaching chastity we not merely
decrease the demand for prostitutes, but we greatly diminish the
supply. Few girls, if any, take to the streets until they have been
seduced; and the antecedents of seduction are the morbid exaggeration
of the sexual appetite, the lack of self-control, and the selfish
hedonism which youthful impurity engenders.

The selfishness, and consequent blindness to cruelty, of which I
write, manifests itself quite early. A boy of chivalrous feeling,
whose blood would boil at any other form of outrage on a girl, will
read a newspaper account of rape or indecent assault with a pleasure
so intense that indignation and disgust are quite crowded out of his
mind.

If, repelled by the coarseness of the streets, the young man allows
lust or passion to lead him into seduction, he commits a crime the
consequences of which are usually cruel in the extreme; for in most
cases the seduced girl sinks of necessity into prostitution. So blind,
so callous does impurity make even the refined and generous, that many
a young man who can be a good son, a good brother, a noble friend, a
patriotic citizen, will doom a girl whose only fault is that she is
physically attractive--and possibly too affectionate and trusting--to
torturing anxiety, to illness, to the horrible suffering of undesired
travail, to disgrace, and in nineteen cases out of twenty to ostracism
and the infamy of the streets. Murder is a small thing compared with
this. Who would not rather that his daughter were killed in her
innocence than that she should be doomed to such a fate?

Many young men are ignorant of the fact that sexual relations with
prostitutes frequently result in the foulest and most terrible of
diseases. Venereal diseases, as these are called, commence in the
private parts themselve