Public morals / [James Marchant, editor].

Date:
[between 1900 and 1910]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Public morals / [James Marchant, editor]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    226/256 (page 226)
    a printed leaflet, a pamphlet, and a book. He has started a personal propaganda of his own, and with great success. He gives a leaflet to a friend for his son, and the friend comes back for further information. He finds the Minister for War awake to the value of these efforts. Officers have received official permission to join the Society, and letters of inquiry from them are constantly coming in. “A favourable current of opinion is setting in in the French army ; the French officer begins to realise his own share in the matter; he too asks only to be informed, and will help the medical officers to the utmost of his power.” The Minister of Marine and the Colonial Minister are also taking up the question. ‘ ‘ In the long-run, it is moral education which must be the essential factor in the campaign against disease.” All this is excellent; and so is the demand for better instructed doctors and gratuitous treatment available for all. But the movement of opinion is not all in this direction. The belief in compulsory measures dies hard; it is difficult, when strong measures fail, to transfer one’s faith to mild ones; the question creeps in, “Would not more coercion have had more success ? ” Thus the lesson of the past is still misread; after a hundred years of failure, time is still claimed for a fresh experiment which is certain to succeed; the form, and not the motive force, is said to have been in fault; it is not coercion that fails, but coercion misapplied. Yet it is curious to see the efforts of old Regula- tionists like Professor Neisser to reserve coercion to the very last resort, while in the last resort it