en rendered so familiar to the world by a long
succession of German writers, by no means involves any special
devotion to the virtue of chastity. Tacitus, indeed, in the
passage more often quoted in Germany than any other passage in
classic literature, while correctly emphasizing the late puberty
of the Germans and their brutal punishment of conjugal infidelity
on the part of the wife, seemed to imply that they were also
chaste. But we have always to remark that Tacitus wrote as a
satirizing moralist as well as a historian, and that, as he
declaimed concerning the virtues of the German barbarians, he had
one eye on the Roman gallery whose vices he desired to lash. Much
the same perplexing confusion has been created by Gildas, who, in
describing the results of the Saxon Conquest of Britain, wrote as
a preacher as well as a historian, and the same moral purpose (as
Dill has pointed out) distorts Salvian's picture of the vices of
fifth century Gaul. (I may add that some of the evidence in favor
of the sexual freedom involved by early Teutonic faiths and
customs is brought together in the study of "Sexual Periodicity"
in the first volume of these _Studies_; cf. also, Rudeck,
_Geschichte der oeffentlichen Sittlichkeit in Deutschland_, 1897,
pp. 146 et seq.).

The freedom and tolerance of Russian sexual customs is fairly
well-known. As a Russian correspondent writes to me, "the
liberalism of Russian manners enables youths and girls to enjoy
complete independence. They visit each other alone, they walk out
alone, and they return home at any hour they please. They have a
liberty of movement as complete as that of grown-up persons; some
avail themselves of it to discuss politics and others to make
love. They are able also to procure any books they please; thus
on the table of a college girl I knew I saw the _Elements of
Social Science_, then prohibited in Russia; this girl lived with
her aunt, but she had her own room, which only her friends were
allowed to enter: her aunt or other relations never entered it.
Naturally, she went out and came back at what hours she pleased.
Many other college girls enjoy the same freedom in their
families. It is very different in Italy, where girls have no
freedom of movement, and can neither go out alone nor receive
gentlemen alone, and where, unlik