The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh.

  • Correa Moylan Walsh
Date:
1917
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The climax of civilisation / by Correa Moylan Walsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    41/170 (page 27)
    omit mention of the ancient vaults or stews. Men therefore are likewise less dependent upon individual women: their mu- tual dependence in great measure breaks down. Consequently marriages are on both sides less desired and become less fre- quent, and when they are entered their dissolution is less dreaded by both parties, and even is desired whenever to either the connection becomes at all irksome; wherefore divorces are common. Moreover, both men and women now have other capital beside land, and may provide for their old age them- selves. Children are by consequence not needed as a future support. Instead, they become a drag, requiring a much longer education, and among the rich often calling for sup- port all through the lifetime of the parents. In fact, children become little more than an agrémeni of life, a luxury, so to speak, yet in rivalry with other luxuries, from which they de- tract. There are many forms of pleasure, which cast into the shade that derivable from legitimate intercourse in the con-. nubial state. Scientific knowledge is also disseminated of the means of preventing issue and even conception, permitting of sexual indulgence without the inconvenience of child-bearing. The growth of luxury in city-life also gives freer scope to promiscuity and prostitution, with dispersion of venereal dis- eases,'! and importation of them into the family, with result on the one hand of rendering the wife sterile or incompetent to bear more than one child, and on the other of giving some women a fright about marriage. Soft living and want of hard work weakens the constitution and not only makes people more sensitive to pain but also less able and willing to undergo it. This is alleviated slightly by voluntary exercise in athletics, which, however, dissipates energy uselessly — chasing after a ball, for instance, which is now done even by grown-up people. Among the many refinements, personal cleanliness becomes habitual, and is often carried to excess, frequent ablutions and rubbings wearing off the epidermis and exposing to contagious diseases, while the sterilisation of surroundings, by giving little 11Tt is of course an error to suppose these a modern phenomenon. From Herodotus, I. 105, it would seem that the Scythians suffered from contact with the depraved Syrians in a manner somewhat analogous to the way the French under Charles VIII. suffered from contact with the de- praved Italians. See also the account of the death of Galerius in Aurelius Victor’s Epitome, XL. 4.