incomparably more moral writer than Shakespeare, ought to have
been a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of his argument, but it
does not appear that anyone pointed out the vulgar confusion into
which he had fallen.

It may be said that the special attractiveness which the
nakedness of great literature sometimes possesses for young minds
is unwholesome. But it must be remembered that the peculiar
interest of this element is merely due to the fact that elsewhere
there is an inveterate and abnormal concealment. It must also be
said that the statements of the great writers about natural
things are never degrading, nor even erotically exciting to the
young, and what Emilia Pardo Bazan tells of herself and her
delight when a child in the historical books of the Old
Testament, that the crude passages in them failed to send the
faintest cloud of trouble across her young imagination, is
equally true of most children. It is necessary, indeed, that
these naked and serious things should be left standing, even if
only to counterbalance the lewdly comic efforts to besmirch love
and sex, which are visible to all in every low-class bookseller's
shop window.

This point of view was vigorously championed by the speakers on
sexual education at the Third Congress of the German Gesellschaft
zur Bekaempfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten in 1907. Thus Enderlin,
speaking as a headmaster, protested against the custom of
bowdlerizing poems and folk-songs for the use of children, and
thus robbing them of the finest introduction to purified sexual
impulses and the highest sphere of emotion, while at the same
time they are recklessly exposed to the "psychic infection" of
the vulgar comic papers everywhere exposed for sale. "So long as
children are too young to respond to erotic poetry it cannot hurt
them; when they are old enough to respond it can only benefit
them by opening to them the highest and purest channels of human
emotion" (_Sexualpaedagogik_, p. 60). Professor Schaefenacker (id.,
p. 98) expresses himself in the same sense, and remarks that "the
method of removing from school-books all those passages which, in
the opinion of short-sighted and narrow-hearted schoolmasters,
are unsuited for youth, must be decisively condemned." Every
healthy boy and girl who has reached the age of puberty ma