Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/153

148 It is generally admitted that there's something wrong in society, but what the cure is or shall be is not so apparent. One class of people advocate "Social Freedom" as the panacea, whatever that may mean. Before I went to, at, and until the last day of, the Chicago Convention, elsewhere alluded to, I thought I knew the correct meaning of the terms. I find I did not; and therefore look in other directions for the social cure. Spoiled cheese, and cheese spoiled, are the same to me; nor for my life can I now see the difference in the moral grade and status of a cyprian or libertine on the pay-rolls, and the same, impulse and passion being the spur and motive. The cheese smells equally bad in both cases!

It wouldn't be a bad thing to make it a punishable offence for any M.D. to call syphilis by the nicer name of scrofula, thus fooling honest wives, and screening recreant husbands—even if they are well paid for their white lies! For in these days that scourge burns the bodies of unspotted virgins, in the shape of furor albus, womb complaint, etc., inherited from infected mothers. The evil is bad enough if it stopped right there, but it don't; because, in the first place, it brings on pruritis,—vaginal itching; creates morbid desire, and subjects girls as pure as snow to the almost dead certainty of falling victims to the first graceful, smart, and salacious scoundrel that comes along,—a scoundrel and victim too, it may be of the same inherited-fluid ruin coursing like streams of fire through his swollen veins! In the second place, these girls are to become wives and mothers; these boys husbands and fathers; thus the curse is injected into the veins of myriads of the yet unborn—children doomed before birth to endure a life of perpetual ill-health and morbid unrest; to know nothing of real happiness from the breast to the tomb—to which latter they are likely to be rushed prematurely by suicide, resultant from insanity begotten by the beings who parented them. Again I repeat Syphilis is a crime, and should be held as such.

CXXVIII. Love is multiple in form and mode. Sometimes it will endure and suffer long. At others it will die as if lightning-struck; but the "dying" sort of affection is not worth tying to! Never!

Irish Love is gallant, but non-lasting, and is more affectional or