nce
persists. Always the customs and beliefs of a past social life live on
beneath the surface of society; in a thousand ways we do not recognize,
they press upon the individual soul. We cannot without strong effort
escape from the chains of our inheritance. In the nations of the West,
where the bridegroom's joy with his bride is never spoken of except as a
subject fit for jests, where celibacy has been extolled and marriage
treated as "a remedy for sin," where barrenness instead of being
regarded as the greatest possible evil is artificially produced, where
the natural joys of the body--the sex-joys and the joy of wine and food
have been confused with disgraceful things--it is there that a perpetual
conflict lurks at the very heart of life; hidden it becomes more active
for evil.

Always times of upheaval and change afford opportunities for escape in
violent expression, and while we bewail the disorder and confusion, the
many sexual crimes that are overwhelming us, we ought to take warning at
our folly in having set up for ourselves the new fashionable god of
"escape from sex."

Women are the worst sinners. At every opportunity the women of my
generation have been insisting on "the monstrous exaggerations of the
claims of sex," breaking away violently from the older obsessing
preoccupation with their position as women, but only to take up new
evasions--fresh miserable attempts at escape. What began as a war of
ideals became before long a chaos. It has had the effect not at all of
minimizing the power of sex, but just as far as the deeper needs and
instincts have been denied, has there been a deliberate turning on the
part of the young to the reliefs of sex-excitements. The servitude of
sex is one of the essential riddles of life. Personally I do not feel
there is any simple solution. The conflict, broadly speaking, lies in
this: our sex needs have changed very little through the ages, now we
are faced with the task of adapting them to the society in which we find
ourselves placed, of conforming with the rules laid down, accepting all
the pressing claims of civilized life, conditions, not clearly thought
out and established to help us and make moral conduct easier, but
dependent much more on property, social rank, and ignorance,--all
combining to make any kind of healthy sex expression more difficult,
which explains our duplicity and so often prevents the acceptance in
practice of the code of conduct upheld by most of