n acknowledged fact, we nevertheless
don't realise it--and in any case, it isn't a nice subject of debate,
and, should the word be even mentioned in the presence of our dear, dear
children, we would ask the speaker to leave the house immediately and
never again return! I, too, was one of these poor fools--although I have
no children to suffer from my foolishness. I knew it was a fact, but
like others I didn't realise that fact--like we didn't realise the horror
and filth and tragedy of war, we who never were "out there"; we who never
"went over the top." But lately I have had to visit a friend in one of
the largest lock hospitals in London. And one day I was obliged to walk
through the waiting-room where the men are forced to sit until they are
summoned to see the doctor. And truly I was appalled! There were
_hundreds of them_ of all ages--from 16 to 60. They were not the serious
cases, of course, and we should pass them in the street without realising
that they were any but physically sound men, often of a very splendid
type. But each one represented a blighted life--a future robbed of
splendid promise, a present of misery and unhappiness stalking through
the world like shame beneath a happy mask. I tell you, it brought the
truth home to me in a way mere figures and statistics could never do. As
I said before, I was appalled: I was also very angry. For I knew that
ignorance was at the bottom of many of these sad tragedies--the criminal
reticence of the people _who know_, too mock-modest to discuss openly a
fact of life which, beyond all other facts of life, should be spoken of
bluntly, honestly, therefore decently and cleanly.

_The Futile Thought_

Too many fond parents like to imagine that their children know nothing at
all of sexual matters--that they are clean and innocent and ignorant, and
that, as long as they can be kept so, they will not run into danger and
disgrace. But no parent really knows how much or how little their
children know of this matter. Children have ears and imagination, and
once they know anything at all--which is at any time from eight years of
age, sometimes, alas! earlier--they should be told everything, not in a
nasty, furtive fashion, glossing over the ugly part and elevating the
decent side until it is out of all proportion to the truth, but quietly,
with dignity, laying stress on the fact that sexual morality is not a
thing of religion and of God, but of self-respect, o