"If, then, the entire population had intercourse with prostitutes in an equal ratio, _the gross population of Great Britain, of all ages and sexes, would, during eighteen years, have been affected with primary syphilis_. Be it remembered, we do not assert that more than a million and a half of _persons_ are attacked every year, but that that number of _cases_ occurs annually in England, Wales, and Scotland, though the same individual may be attacked more than once. Although it is evident that all the estimates used for these calculations are (we know no other word that expresses it) ridiculously low, yet we find that more than a million and a half of cases of syphilis occur every year,--an amount which is probably not half the actual number. How enormous, then, must be the number of children born with secondary disease! How immense the mortality among them! How vast an amount of public and private money expended on the cure of this disease!"
The same reviewer (P. S. Holland), in another article on the "Control of Prostitution," observes that among the British troops syphilis is one of the most frequent of diseases, about one hundred and eighty cases occurring annually among every one thousand soldiers.
The effect of syphilis in depopulating the islands of the Pacific has been pointed out in a former chapter; the nature and origin of the disease that takes them off is unmistakable. Scrofula and rapid phthisis are taking off the inhabitants at a rate that, in those islands most affected, the native population will soon become extinct. According to Lancereaux, in the Marquesas group the women do not live beyond the age of thirty to thirty-five years, three or four months being the duration of the disease. Ellis, in his "Polynesian Researches," published in 1836, remarks that at that date the disease, as above described, had but recently appeared. In the nineteenth volume of the "Archives de Médecine Navale," Rey mentions that at the Easter Island pulmonary phthisis is the dominant affection with the adults, and that scrofula is very prevalent with the children.[75]
The effect of syphilization in inducing a scrofulous taint and the appearance of a rapidly-marching consumption among savage races has been well observed among the Indians in the southwestern parts of the United States, where the appearance of these fatal diseases can easily be traced to that as a cause. There is something peculiar about the Anglo-Saxon race that is fatal to the Indian; wherever they come in contact, the savage race begins physically and morally to crumble; the habits of the Anglo-Saxon in the matter of intemperance and his lust soon end the poor Indian; while, on the other hand, the Latin races mix with them without any physical detriment to the Indian. In what was formerly the Northwest Territory the French and Indian intermarried, and syphilis did not begin to tell on the Indian until the Americans settled the country. From these observations it is very evident that in the Polynesian Archipelago syphilis must have been the precursor of the phthisis and scrofula, as we know it to have been that which induced those diseases among the Indians of the Mississippi or Missouri Valleys, or of the Colorado and Mojave Deserts, or in the mountains and valleys of Arizona.