304 HEREDITY AND SELECTION IN SOCIOLOGY 



through inexperience ; and, the disease having declared itself, 

 his chief anxiety is usually to conceal it, owing to the prejudice 

 against syphilis — a prejudice which it is one of the duties of 

 science to remove. And what is the result ? The patient goes 

 through an insufficient cure, imagines all to be well, marries a 

 little later on, and then, ten or fifteen years later, the responsible 

 and married man pays the bill in the shape of some terrible 

 tertiary complication. Cannot we see that the whole result of 

 our education must tend to an augmentation of juvenile syphilis, 

 which already, as we have seen, constitutes more than one-half 

 of the total, and which is the most deplorable of aU forms of 

 syphilis, for it is the one which does most injury to the race ? 

 The young man who goes to college has seldom a clear and pre- 

 cise notion of what syphilis is, and it is precisely what he should 

 know. It is at least as important for the race that its young 

 men, on whom its virility depends, should have a clear notion 

 of therapeutics, that they should know what syphilis means for 

 the individual, for the family, and for their children later on, 

 as that they should be able to translate Aristophanes at sight, 

 or read Dante in the original. 



Syphilis constitutes in the highest degree a danger for the 

 individual and for the race. It is in the interests of the race 

 to combat it by every means in its power. We are far from 

 saying that the supervision of prostitute women and the licensing 

 of special houses always attains the result aimed at. Unfor- 

 tunately, reliable comparative statistics as to the frequency of 

 syphilis in different countries cannot be obtained, so that it is 

 impossible to say definitely whether more syphilis prevails in 

 cities like London, where no supervision is admitted, than in 

 cities like Paris and Vienna. The comparative statistics given 

 by Ziirich and Geneva, which have adopted opposite policies in 

 this respect, can be entirely neglected. Nevertheless, it would 

 seem a priori as if supervision had the advantage, which is ia- 

 contestably great, of confining the woman once found to be 



