210 PLAIN FACTS FOR OLD AND YOUNG 



tion or fornication. I have almost daily to tell such 

 persons that physically, and in a sanitary point of 

 view, they are ruining their constitutions. There are 

 young men who almost pass their lives in making carnal 

 acquaintances in the street, but stop just short of se- 

 ducing girls ; there are others who haunt the lower class 

 of places of public amusement for the purpose of sex- 

 ual excitement, and live, in fact, a thoroughly immoral 

 life in all respects, except actually going home with 

 prostitutes. Wlien these men come to me, laboring 

 under the various forms of impotence, they are sur- 

 prised at my suggesting to them the possibility that 

 the impairment of their powers is dependent upon these 

 previous vicious habits." * 



"Those lascivious day-dreams and amorous rever- 

 ies, in which young people, and especially the idle and 

 the voluptuous and the sedentary and th6 nervous, are 

 exceedingly apt to indulge, are often the source of 

 general debility and effeminacy, disordered functions, 

 premature disease, and even premature death, without 

 the actual exercise of the genital organs ! Indeed, this 

 unchastity of thought, this adultery of the mind, is the 

 beginning of immeasurable evil to the human family. ' ' f 



To multitudes of men and women amativeness, or 

 sexual love, means lust. The word love has been low- 

 ered and debased until it might almost be considered 

 practically synonymous with sensuality. The first step 

 toward reform must be a recognition of a higher and 

 purer relation than that which centers every thought 

 upon the gratification of the animal in human nature. 

 If one may judge from the facts which now and then 

 come to the surface, it would appear that the opportu- 

 nity for sensual gratification has come to be, in the 

 world at large, the chief attraction between the sexes. 



* Acton, t Grahaia*^ 



