Similarly every effort should be made to prevent women becoming diseased,
no matter how immoral they may be. The prostitute is very often a woman of
peculiar mentality or overdeveloped animal instincts; and many women are
driven to prostitution by drink and poverty. The prostitute class is
largely recruited from mentally and morally deficient girls, who are
themselves the offspring of syphilitic or alcoholic parents. Prostitution
is the effect--not the cause--of anti-social acts and conditions. We must
remedy the causes of these before we can hope to remove the effects. Under
present social conditions, attempting to abolish prostitution by shutting
up tolerated houses is just as idle as attempting to lower the temperature
of a room by smashing the thermometer. All we can do is to make and keep
these women clean. If we decline to do even that, then diseased women will
succeed in contaminating our men much faster than we can instruct the men
in sexual cleanliness.[B]

[Footnote B: Diseased women will continue to cater for men so long as they
are left free to do so, but as knowledge grows their clients will tend to
be limited to _diseased men_. Once men clearly understand that _every_
casual connection is a risk of disease, they will certainly tend to run
fewer risks.--E.A.R.]

And again, just as the medical prevention of venereal disease was not
proposed, and has not been applied for the purpose of fostering or
condoning promiscuous intercourse,[C] so the conscious control of
fecundity by contraception must not be applied in such a way as to lessen
the proportion of well-born citizens in the nation taken as a whole.
Birth-control applied only by the responsible classes of the community
combined with indiscriminate fecundity among the irresponsible masses,
must inevitably lead to the lowering of the general average in character,