havoc with our whole posterity. For instead of strong, healthy children, blessed with natural feelings, we shall see miserable specimens of humanity resulting from economic calculation. For economic considerations are becoming more and more the foundations of marriage and the sole preliminary condition of it. And love looks for an outlet elsewhere.

Here, as elsewhere, one may defy Nature for a certain period of time; but sooner or later she will take her inexorable revenge. And when man realizes this truth it is often too late.

Our own nobility furnishes an example of the devastating consequences that follow from a persistent refusal to recognize the primary conditions necessary for normal wedlock. Here we are openly brought face to face with the results of those reproductive habits which on the one hand are determined by social pressure and, on the other, by financial considerations. The one leads to inherited debility and the other to adulteration of the blood-strain; for all the Jewish daughters of the department store proprietors are looked upon as eligible mates to co-operate in propagating His Lordship's stock. And the stock certainly looks it. All this leads to absolute degeneration. Nowadays our bourgeoise are making efforts to follow in the same path, They will come to the same journey's end.

These unpleasant truths are hastily and nonchalantly brushed aside, as if by so doing the real state of affairs could also be abolished. But no. It cannot be denied that the population of our great towns and cities is tending more and more to avail of prostitution in the exercise of its amorous instincts and is thus becoming more and more contaminated by the scourge of venereal disease. On the one hand, the visible effects of this mass-infection can be observed in our insane asylums and, on the other hand, alas! among the children at home. These are the doleful and tragic witnesses to the steadily increasing scourge that is poisoning our sexual life. Their sufferings are the visible results of parental vice.

There are many ways of becoming resigned to this unpleasant and terrible fact. Many people go about seeing nothing or, to be more correct, not wanting to see anything. This is by far the simplest and cheapest attitude to adopt. Others cover themselves in the sacred mantle of prudery, as ridiculous as it is false. They describe the whole condition of affairs as sinful and are profoundly indignant when brought face to face with a victim. They close their eyes in reverend abhorrence to this godless scourge and pray to the Almighty that He--if possible after their own death--may rain down fire and brimstone as on Sodom and Gomorrah and so once again make an outstanding example of this shameless section of humanity. Finally, there are those who are well aware of the terrible results which this scourge will and must bring about, but they merely shrug their shoulders, fully convinced of their inability to undertake anything against this peril. Hence matters are allowed to take their own course.

Undoubtedly all this is very convenient and simple, only it must not be overlooked that this convenient way of approaching things can have fatal consequences for our national life. The excuse that other nations are also not faring any better does not alter the fact of our own deterioration, except that the feeling of sympathy for other stricken nations makes our own suffering easier to bear. But the important question that arises here is: Which nation will be the first to take the initiative in mastering this scourge, and which nations will succumb to it? This will be the final upshot of the whole situation. The present is a period of probation for racial values. The race that fails to come through the test will simply die out and its place will be taken by the healthier and stronger races, which will be able to endure greater hardships. As this problem primarily concerns posterity, it belongs to that category of which it is said with terrible justification that the sins of the fathers are visited on their offspring unto the tenth generation. This is a consequence which follows on an infringement of the laws of blood and race.

The sin against blood and race is the hereditary sin in this world and it brings disaster on every nation that commits it.

The attitude towards this one vital problem in pre-War Germany was most