Boys should learn that the man who insists on premarital sexual necessity
has two roads open to him--one that of the libertine and seducer, the most
contemptible of creatures; the other that of the whore-follower, whom
nature perpetually menaces with vile and pestilential plagues, making him
a misery to himself and menace to all clean persons who associate with
him, especially his future wife and unborn children.

This involves, at least for the present state of society, some information
regarding the two chief venereal diseases: that all prostitutes,
professional or otherwise, are sooner or later infected, and that no
reglementation can give security. They should know something of the
horrors of syphilis, its loathsomeness, its extraordinary power to
penetrate to the physiological Holy of Holies, poison the germ cells, and
damn in advance the unborn children of its victim. They must know the
fatal treachery of gonorrhea: how it lurks unsuspected in the victim who
supposes himself cured, and strikes, like a bolt out of clear sky,
blinding newborn infants, and robbing innocent wives of motherhood,
health, or life itself.

To object to this instruction because it is gruesome, or because it may
seem like intimidation, is sentimentalism: in this matter, as elsewhere in
the realm of knowledge, the truth should scare no one who does not need to
be scared. It is better to be safe than sorry; and it is better to be
scared than syphilitic. "I dare do all that may become a man," says
Macbeth; "who dares do more is none"; let a man dare if he will with his
own body, aye, his own soul; he is but a coward who does not shrink from
buying voluptuous moments with the hazard of wife and child. Hydrophobia
is far less perilous than venereal disease, and if one hundredth as many
were attacked by it the world would be placarded with scarlet danger