n the germ of life
to the children of his body. A few lessons on heredity will show him that
he is but the steward of an inheritance that has come down from a thousand
ancestors and may well be perpetuated through generations to come.
Prudence is good; but no narrow selfish motive will meet the need. The lad
who is "good" merely for the sake of his own skin is usually a poor
creature; the finest lad--who might perhaps hazard his own individual
fate--will refuse to gamble with the souls and bodies of those others who
shall be his own flesh and blood. No virtue is safe that is not
enthusiastic: and only altruism is truly enthusiastic.

The boy and girl, now young man and young woman, must both learn that
prostitution is a social sin:[39] the "scarlet woman" has been truly
called the eternal priestess bearing the sins of humanity. This is a vast
theme; we have got beyond the realm of mere sex education;--but truth is
one, and life is one, and neither logic nor humanity will consent to our
stopping short of the whole truth. Social intelligence--the illumination
of man's life with man--the scientific and spiritual comprehension of the
apostolic dictum, "We are all members one of another"--and "if one member
suffer, all members suffer with it"--these are the great arrears of
education. But there never was a time when the spirit of man moved so
rapidly forward as here and now, and the movement for sex education is but
one striking phase of the great advance.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] An examination of tables of contents and indexes of standard school
texts in nature study and biology will reveal the almost universal absence
of all ideas relating to sex and reproduction. There are two or three
recent exceptions.

[31] G. Stanley Hall, _Educational Problems_, vol. I, pp. 388-97, Thomson
and Geddes, _Problems of Sex_, pp. 5-17.

[32] Thomson and Geddes, _op. cit._, pp. 46-52; Saleeby, _Parenthood and
Race Culture_; Morrow, _Social Diseases and Marriage; Hall, Educational
Problems_, vol. I, pp. 424-43.

[33] Fisher, _National Vitality_; Hall, _Youth_, chaps. II, V, VI, XII.

[34] "What makes a Magazine?" _Twentieth Century Magazine_, September,
1912, pp. 11-20; _The Exploitation of Pleasure._ Russell Sage Foundation.

[35] See Mrs. Woodallen Chapman, _The Moral Problem of the Children_, esp.
pp. 61-93. Also the chapter in this book on the education of children.

[36] An epoch-marking book in this field is Miss Torelle's _Plant an