Vice
cuts the birth rate chiefly through the diseases which accompany it.
About 20 per cent of American marriages are childless, and medical
authorities state that in one half of these childless marriages the
barrenness is due to venereal diseases. According to Dr. Prince A.
Morrow, in his _Social Diseases and Marriage_, 75 per cent of the
young men in the United States become impure before marriage. This
serves to disseminate venereal diseases among the general population,
especially among innocent women and children. The consequence is, on the
one hand, a considerable number of sterile marriages and on the other
hand a high infant mortality. It need not be assumed, as we have already
said, that vice is more prevalent to-day than in previous generations,
but on account of the conditions of our social life diseases which
accompany vice are now more widely disseminated than they have been at
any time in our previous history; therefore, even the physical results
of vice are different to-day than they were a generation or more ago.
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