were feeble-minded by the Binet tests, and to be
regarded as "helpless victims." (Walter Clarke, _Social Hygiene_, June,
1915, and _Journal of Mental Science_, Jan., 1916, p. 222.) There are
fallacies in these figures, but it would appear that about half of the
prostitutes in institutions are to be regarded as mentally defective.
XI
THE CONQUEST OF VENEREAL DISEASE
The final Report of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases has brought
to an end an important and laborious investigation at what many may
regard as an unfavourable moment. Perhaps, however, the moment is not so
unfavourable as it seems. There is no period when venereal diseases
flourish so exuberantly as in war time, and we shall have a sad harvest
to gather here when the War is over.[1] Moreover, the War is teaching us
to face the real facts of life more frankly and more courageously than
ever before, and there is no field, scarcely even a battlefield, where a
training in frankness and courage is so necessary as in this of Venereal
Disease. It is difficult even to say that there is any larger field, for
it has been found possible to doubt whether the great War of to-day, when
all is summed up, will have produced more death, disease, and misery than
is produced in the ordinary course of events, during a single generation,
by venereal disease.
There are, as every man and woman ought to know, two main and quite
distinct diseases (any other being unimportant) poetically termed
"Venereal" because chiefly, though not by any means only, propagated in
the intercourse over which the Roman goddess Venus once presided.
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