THE KING’S BUSINESS 1061 The greatest danger that confronts our young men who are going .to the training camps and especially those who are going across the water to the battle front, is not from German bullets or bombs or gases
Our Most
Dangerous Enemy.
or liquid fire, but from sin in its grossest form. In the Spanish-American war many young men who had previously led pure lives were corrupted. Dr. M. J. Exner of the Y. M. C. A. in a carefully written article on the matter in the New York Evening Post says, “The ravages of prostitution in our army during the Spanish-American war present the blackest page of its history. The fact that in the Philippines the venereal rate rose to more than 301 per thousand, several times greater than that of any other disease, tells a depressing story of military waste and of debauched manhood and degraded womanhood.” From this we see that almost one in every three of our young men who went to the Philippines were corrupted. Things have been even worse in the English army in France. It is said that during! the first year of the war that one of the powers at war had more men who were incapacitated for service by venereal disease than in fighting at the front. The chief of one medical staff informed Dr. Exner that in the country to which'he belonged there were 17,000 cases of disease concentrated in a single hospital camp. The officer of one of the armies, who represented his country at absolutely every battle front, gave me the infor mation that more than one-third of the soldiers were incapacitated for service by diseases resulting from impurity. Last year when our soldiers were on the Mexican border it is said that “vice in its most flagrant forms flpurished exten sively in the environment of the military camps, The vice-districts became virtually the play-ground of the army. . . . Disease in many units devel oped to a serious degree. Thousands of fine fellows who came to the border clean in their lives, and with fair promises to keep their manhood untainted, fell victims to the allurements of commercialized vice and returned home, if not injured in health, certainly demoralized in the finest qualities of their man hood.^ >There are those who hold that these conditions are absolutely neces sary. That the soldiers Would be dissatisfied and will not fight as they ought unless they are allowed liberties in the matter of social vice. Experience teaches that this is not true, the experience, for example, .of the Japanese in their war with Russia, where-they had war for eighteen months and the men were kept absolutely away from contact with women. This was not done because the Japanese are a people of superior morality. The Japanese under ordinary con ditions are not superior but are inferior morally along these lines, as any per son who has visited Japan knows, and Japan, under ordinary circumstances, has a high rate of venereal disease. This was done simply as a military meas ure and the Japanese, in spite of their inferior morality, have shown how easily possible it is. Furthermore we have had a demonstration of the same thing among our own soldiers. While moral conditions with some of our troops on the Mexican border were appalling, “A commander of one camp of 19,000 troops completely suppressed prostitution and the sale of intoxicants. This firm attitude was never relaxed during the entire stay of the troops on the border. Prostitution and drink were made practically inaccessible to this body of troops with the exception of the few who occasionally got leave of absence to go to distant cities.” If one commander could do this, every commander can do it also. But when our troops get to France there will be peculiar conditions arising from the relation of our soldiers to those of other armies, and the rela-
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