unished without offending the common sense of the community.
(Cf. Bloch, _The Sexual Life of Our Time_, Ch. XXIV; he considers
that the "age of consent" should begin with the completion of the
sixteenth year.)

It may be necessary to add that the establishment of the "age of
consent" on this basis by no means implies that intercourse with
girls but little over sixteen should be encouraged, or even
socially and morally tolerated. Here, however, we are not in the
sphere of law. It is the natural tendency of the well-born and
well-nurtured girl under civilized conditions to hold herself in
reserve, and the pressure whereby that tendency is maintained and
furthered must be supplied by the whole of her environment,
primarily by the intelligent reflection of the girl herself when
she has reached the age of adolescence. To foster in a young
woman who has long passed the epoch of puberty the notion that
she has no responsibility in the guardianship of her own body and
soul is out of harmony with modern feeling, as well as
unfavorable to the training of women for the world. The States
which have been induced to adopt the high limit of the age of
consent have, indeed, thereby made an abject confession of their
inability to maintain a decent moral level by more legitimate
means; they may profitably serve as a warning rather than as an
example.

The knowledge of women cannot, however, replace, the ignorance of men,
but, on the contrary, merely serves to reveal it. For in the art of love
the man must necessarily take the initiative. It is he who must first
unseal the mystery of the intimacies and audacities which the woman's
heart may hold. The risk of meeting with even the shadow of contempt or
disgust is too serious to allow a woman, even a wife, to reveal the
secrets of love to a man who has not shown himself to be an
initiate.[387] Numberless are the jovial and contented husbands who have
never suspected, and will never know, that their wives carry about with
them, sometimes with silent resentment, the ache of mysterious _tabus_.
The feeling that there are delicious privacies and privileges which she
has never been asked to take, or forced to accept, often erotically
divorces a wife from a husband who never realizes what he has missed.[388]
The case of such husbands is all the harder because, for the most part,
all that they have done is th