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precious and quintessential volume under some such title as "Wordsworth
and Womanhood." One would do it oneself but that literary people of a
certain school regard it as an impertinence that any one who believes in
knowledge should intrude into their sphere. Wordsworth, it is true, said
that "poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the
impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science." But
most literary people are so busy writing that they have no time to read,
and they forget these sayings of the immortal dead. Yet that is just a
saying which directly bears upon the present contention. We must be very
careful lest we insult and outrage girlhood with our physiology, not
that physiology is either insolent or outrageous, but that girlhood is
girlhood. It is the "breath and finer spirit" of our knowledge of sex
and parenthood that we must seek to impart to her. Poetry is its
vehicle, and the time will come when we shall consciously use it for
that great purpose.

But we cannot expect the adolescent girl to be content even with Ruskin
and Wordsworth. She must, of course, have fiction, and under this
heading there is more or less accessible to her every possibility in the
gamut of morality, from the teaching of such a book as "Richard
Feverel" down to the excrement and sewage that defile the railway
book-stalls to-day under the guise of "bold, reverent, and fearless
handling of the great sex problems." The present writer is one of those
old-fashioned enough to believe that it matters a great deal what young
people read. We are all hygienists nowadays, and very particular as to
what enters our children's mouths. But what is the value of these
precautions if we relax our care as to what enters their minds?

It is my misfortune to be scarcely acquainted at all with fiction, and I
can presume to offer no detailed guidance in this matter. The name of
Mr. Eden Phillpotts must certainly be mentioned as foremost among those
living writers who care for these things. In the Eugenics Education
Society it was at one time hoped to see the formation of a branch of
fiction in the library which might form the nucleus of a catalogue, well
worth disseminating if only it could be compiled, of fiction worthy the
consumption of girlhood. Perhaps it would hardly be necessary for the
present writer to protest that the didactic, the unnaturally good, the
well-meaning, the entirely amateur types of fiction,