genital passages, and if these were kept sweet and clean there would soon
be an end to venereal disease. It is not a matter of making _vice_ safe:
it is a matter of making _marriage_ safe: a matter of restoring and
maintaining physical health, family and national, and above all, of
protecting innocent women and children, for if vice has its dangers so
also in these days has innocence its own peculiar perils, and it is the
cry of these victims--often so young and so fair--that must affect us most
deeply.

More than fourteen years ago, Mr. George Bernard Shaw, in the Preface to
"Getting Married," wrote the following regarding "The Pathology of
Marriage":--

"As to the evils of disease and contagion, our consciences are
sound enough: what is wrong with us is ignorance of the facts. No
doubt this is a very formidable ignorance in a country where the
first cry of the soul is, 'Don't tell me: I don't want to know,'
and where frantic denials and furious suppressions indicate
everywhere the cowardice and want of faith which conceives life as
something too terrible to be faced. In this particular case, 'I
don't want to know' takes a righteous air, and becomes 'I don't
want to know anything about the diseases which are the just
punishment of wretches who should not be mentioned in my presence
or in any book that is intended for family reading.' Wicked and
foolish as the spirit of this attitude is, the practice of it is so
easy and lazy and uppish that it is very common, but its cry is
drowned by a louder and more sincere one. We who do not want to
know, also do not want to go blind, to go mad, to be disfigured, to
be barren, to become pestiferous, or to see such things happening
to our children. We learn, at last, that the majority of the