deed it may happen that considerations more
worldly and prudential, less generally natural and eugenic, may come to
have greater weight. One can, therefore, only leave it to the reader's
consideration whether it is not high time that we should so seek to
prepare the girl's mind, that when her body Is ready for marriage her
mind may, if possible, be ready also to guide her towards a worthy
choice which the whole of her future life may ratify, and the life of
her descendants thereafter.

It must be insisted again that this question has many ramifications, and
that not the least important of them are those which concern themselves
with the kinds of disease already referred to. Some enemy of God and man
once invented a phrase about the desirability of young men sowing their
wild oats, and subsequent enemies of life and the good and progress, or
perhaps mere fools, animated gramophones of a cheap pattern, have
repeated and still propagate that doctrine. It is poisonous to its core;
it never did any one any good, and has done incalculable harm. It has
blinded the eyes of hundreds of thousands of babies; it has brought
hundreds of thousands more rotten into the world. Hosts of dead men,
women, and children are its victims. It is indeed good that a man should
be a man, and not a worm on stilts; it is indeed good that women should
prefer men to be men, and that as soon as possible they should cease to
accept in marriage the feeble, the cowardly, the echoers, and the sheep.
But this is a very different thing from asserting that it is good for
young men, before marriage, to adopt a standard of morality which would
be thought shameful beyond words in their sisters, and which has all the
horrible consequences that have been alluded to, and many more. Now,
vicious though the wild oats doctrine be in itself and in its
consequences, we have to grant that there is little need of it, for
young manhood needs the insertion of no doctrines from without to
encourage it towards the satisfaction of what are in themselves natural
and healthy tendencies. Our right procedure therefore should
be--notwithstanding the unhealthy tendency of high civilization in this
respect, and notwithstanding the terrible folly, traitorous to their
sex, of those women who decry marriage, and seek to delay it--to prepare
girlhood and public opinion, and even to modify, so far as may be
necessary, economic conditions, in order that the girls who are worthy
to marry a