love-relationship, not loveless-relationship; and they are really quite
fit to be trusted with the evolution of the race through passionate love
and the worship of beauty, as soon as society makes harmonious provision
for their normal sexual needs. Until society does make early marriage
practicable for all healthy adult men and women, say between twenty and
twenty-five years of age, extra-marital relationship, however undesirable,
is inevitable, because there are many men to whom, at times, any woman is
better than no woman.

But extra-marital relationship is never even safe, because of its
promiscuity and impermanence, except in properly conducted and effectively
supervised tolerated houses. The tolerated house is absolutely necessary
at present to protect women from disease and immorality, by confining this
kind of intercourse as far as possible in certain definite channels. The
abolition of the tolerated house spreads both disease and immorality into
classes of women who would otherwise be immune, and enormously increases
the dangers of promiscuous intercourse. Separated from their toilet
equipment the women cannot make and keep themselves clean; on the streets
they are not taught to refuse intercourse with diseased men; thus their
occupation becomes more and more dangerous as medical supervision is
removed. They inevitably become diseased; sometimes contract mixed
infections, which they pass on to their clients--the future husbands and
fathers of the nation--and "The sins of the fathers are visited upon the
children even unto the third and fourth generation." All this would be
impossible if women generally would recognise the primary fact that
because a man is immoral that it is no reason why he should become
syphilitic. We all want to abolish sin, but failing that we must cease
wanting to poison the sinner. We must actively work to save him from the
penalties of his folly, for that is the only way in which we can save his
victims and succeed ultimately in "Making Marriage Safe."