Even the most respectable men and women, knowing not what they do, both read and applaud the book which is strongly suggestive of the "Quartier Latin" of Paris, and other books which hintingly portray the sensual side of humanity. Through a dense ignorance of the sexual side of human nature, they fail to observe abuses of decency which are at once apparent to the medical profession.
The world's hardest problem has been the subjugation of this social evil of impurity; partly because society is distinguished for its ignorance regarding the sexual life, having as a rule only one idea, and that a wrong one; and partly because every advance which civilization makes is met by the hostile ridicule of the uninformed, by scurrilous literature, by indecent advertisements, by sensually suggestive plays, by the indecencies of fashion and the ballroom, and by many other causes which operate to maintain in a consant state of stimulation the cerebral centres which preside over the generative functions.
The following quotation succinctly sums up a vast amount of profound wisdom, each clause of which at once suggests the active measures which must be taken for the preservation of the nation:
"See the wiles and activity and open warfare of impurity. The popular literature of the day is largely subservient to it. Novels exhaling its stench burden news-stands and book agents' baskets. Evil papers obtain readers by the hundreds of thousands, and drive out of the market self respecting and decent publications. Painting and sculpture, whose mission it should be to elevate and ennoble the mind by the representations of humanity's best deeds, reveal the human form in hideous suggestiveness.
Theatrical posters are to our young people unmistakable object lessons in lasciviousness, and the stage, which might be one of the most useful interpreters of wisdom and virtue, not infrequently becomes the panderer to lowest passions. Cultured society serves the interests of vice by its immodest fashions in dances and in female dress. Public opinion is debased; virtue, it is thought, is sufficiently avenged when a fallen woman is declared an outcast; but the man who compassed her ruin goes scot free, and is the welcome visitor to club and drawing room. Laws against open immorality are dead letters.
Tempters to sin promenade unmolested our streets; homes of iniquity flaunt their wickedness before the public gaze; orgies born of demons occur in public halls with the avowed connivance of the police. Sin sets itself up as a profession under shadowy names through which the purpose is easily read, and advertises itself through the columns of our newspapers. Base men and women go around entrapping unwary girlhood into lives of shame; procurers and procuresses are constantly prowling, as so many jackals, in search of human bodies to cast them in prey to cruel lust.
"Laws protect sin. The child of ten or fourteen years in many places is presumed to be of sufficient age to barter away her innocence, and her seducer cannot be convicted of crime. There are States in the country where the violation of a woman is no violation of law, if her color is not Caucasian white. The impudence of vice attempts to go further, and demands that infamy be licensed by law, that women be stamped with the badge of professional vice, and that the partners in their iniquity be protected by the law of the land and be secured by legal inquests from the diseases to which criminal indulgence might otherwise expose them".