Human Physiology. 63 



baby? The poor baby's life, in many instances, is sacrificed; 

 and the rich baby may not be a gainer. 



The sin of lust, the deep taint of impurity, is restricted to no 

 class, no position, no age. The respectable married people of 

 the luxurious middle and upper classes are probably the most 

 flagrant violators of the laws of true morality. Children born 

 of lust and the abuses of marriage inherit the taint in their 

 constitutions, and in all the innocence of ignorance, utterly 

 unwatched and unwarned as they generally are, fall into the 

 physical evils and contamination of vice from their tenderest 

 years. A vice so inherited is propagated to others, and every 

 school may become and most schools, it is to be feared, do 

 become centres of sensuality and the most destructive vice. 

 The highest public schools and the universities are not free 

 from this pervading evil. Of this great and terrible evil which 

 poisons the life of the best children and youth of both sexes, I 

 shall have to write seriously, scientifically, and I trust effect- 

 ually, in a later chapter. I can here say that a perverted 

 sensuality, which has its origin before birth, spares no age or 

 sex, and afflicts individuals and societies with some of its most 

 dreadful evils and sufferings. 



This sensuality, stimulated by unnatural modes of living, by 

 luxury in food, in drinks, in narcotics, in dress and amuse- 

 ments, is the cause and also the effect of licentious literature. 

 Poets pander to sensuality and stimulate a life of lust. Circu- 

 lating libraries teem with what an English review coarsely 

 called "hot novels," and these novels form a great part of the 

 .amusement almost the whole employment of thousands of 

 idle women. Do we not see them lolling at their windows, or 

 sitting on the shore at the sea-side places every summer, deep 

 in the last sensation novel from Mudie's? 



Lower down down in the depths of this depravity we have 

 a grosser form of impure literature, to the supply of vhich 

 nearly every shop in two streets in the heart of London w s not 



