ny difference whatever be made between the lungs or
the stomach, and the sex organs; it is often the very making of any
distinction that causes and helps cause all the trouble." Now the case
against all secrecy would be valid if the premises of the argument were
sound. Roughly speaking, lungs are lungs, and stomachs are stomachs, but
the sex organs and their impulses, reflexes, and irradiations are
connected with the subtlest complexes of mind and affections, inextricably
connected with everything human, with further irradiations into the entire
social body.

By all that makes it important to prevent the private and mutual secrecies
of children, by so much and ten times more is it important to establish
confidential secrecy between parent and child. For in so doing, you not
only prevent the undesirable secrecy, but you build normally on modesty;
you lay foundations for a true sense of shame, disgust, and disgrace; and
in doing so, set up one of the strong defenses against perversions and
prurient allurement and seduction.

Prudery should be made impossible and true modesty conserved by proper
secrecy in sex matters, and back of that by the proper attitude,
conversation, and practice in the child's familiar domestic functions.
Prudery and modesty must not be confounded; for by as much as we condemn
the one, ought we to value the other.

Up to the time, then, that a child goes to school, everything has probably
been done that can be done so far as its instruction is concerned, (1) if
the child has been kept as far as possible from foul suggestions from
others; (2) if the child has had its questions honestly answered or
temporarily though unevasively postponed; (3) if the child knows from its
parents' lips that it came into the world from its mother's body, first
growing there "beneath its mother's heart" until it was strong enough to
be born; and that the mother would never have wished to have her child
grow in her body had it not been that there was a strong man who would
care for both mother and little child with great love and tenderness; that
there has to be a father to love the mother and child, and that,
therefore, mother and child must love the father, and the child must love
both father and mother, and that this love is what makes the home; and (4)
if in the process of imparting information, confidence has been
established and modesty conserved.

Anyone who has ever seen a group of six- to ten-year-old boys and