ehemence of condemnation. Now,
there are excellent reasons and a permanent necessity for the
preservation of decency, and for a far more stringent suppression of
matter that is merely intended to excite than at present obtains, and
the chief of these reasons lies in the need of preserving the young from
a premature awakening, and indeed, in the interests of civilization, in
positively delaying the period of awakening, retarding maturity and
lengthening the period of growth and preparation as much as possible.
But purity and innocence may be prolonged too late; innocence is really
no more becoming to adults than a rattle or a rubber consoler, and the
bashfulness that hampers this discussion, that permits it only in a
furtive silly sort of way, has its ugly consequences in shames and
cruelties, in miserable households and pitiful crises, in the production
of countless, needless, and unhappy lives. Indeed, too often we carry
our decency so far as to make it suggestive and stimulating in a
non-natural way; we invest the plain business of reproduction with a
mystic religious quality far more unwholesome than a savage nakedness
could possibly be.

The essential aspect of all this wild and windy business of the sexual
relations is, after all, births. Upon this plain fact the people of the
emergent New Republic will unhesitatingly go. The pre-eminent value of
sexual questions in morality lies in the fact that the lives which will
constitute the future are involved. If they are not involved, if we can
dissociate this relationship from this issue, then sexual questions
become of no more importance than the morality of one's deportment at
chess, or the general morality of outdoor games. Indeed, then the
question of sexual relationships would be entirely on all fours with,
and probably very analogous to, the question of golf. In each case it
would be for the medical man and the psychologist to decide how far the
thing was wholesome and permissible, and how far it was an aggressive
bad habit and an absorbing waste of time and energy. An able-bodied man
continually addicted to love-making that had no result in offspring
would be just as silly and morally objectionable as an able-bodied man
who devoted his chief energies to hitting little balls over golf-links.
But no more. Both would probably be wasting the lives of other human
beings--the golfer must employ his caddie. It is entirely the matter of
births, and a further consideration