When first our attention is called to
these evils, we are apt to blame the individuals concerned. The parents
of youths, finding their sons infected, will blame neither their guilty
selves nor their sons, but those who tempted them. It is constantly
forgotten that the unfortunate woman who infected the boy was herself
first infected by a man. Either she was betrayed by an individual
blackguard, or our appalling carelessness regarding girlhood, and the
economic conditions which, for the glory of God and man, simultaneously
maintain Park Lane and prostitution, forced her into the circumstances
which brought infection. But she was once as harmless and innocent as
the girl child of any reader of this book; and it was man who first
destroyed her and made her the instrument of further destruction.
Ask how this came to be so, and the answer is that he in his turn was
infected by some woman.
It is time, then, that we ceased to blame youth of either sex, and laid
the onus where it lies--upon the shoulders of older people, and more
especially upon those who by education and profession, or by the
functions they have undertaken, such as parenthood, ought to know the
facts and ought to act upon their knowledge. It is necessary to proceed,
therefore: though perfectly aware that in many ways this chapter will
have to be paid for by the writer: that he has yet to meet the eye of
his publisher; that there will be abundance of abuse from those "whose
sails were never to the tempest given": but aware also that in time to
come those few who dared speak and take their chance in this matter,
whether remembered or not, will have been the pioneers in reforming an
abuse which daily makes daylight hideous.
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