in the difficult task of working towards the abolition of that
superstitious horror have taken up a moral task of the first
importance.

Walter Gerhard, in a thoughtful and sensible paper on the
educational question ("Ein Kapitel zur Erziehungsfrage,"
_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. i, Heft 2), points out that
it is the adult who needs education in this matter--as in so many
other matters of sexual enlightenment--considerably more than the
child. Parents educate their children from the earliest years in
prudery, and vainly flatter themselves that they have thereby
promoted their modesty and morality. He records his own early
life in a tropical land and accustomed to nakedness from the
first. "It was not till I came to Germany when nearly twenty that
I learnt that the human body is indecent, and that it must not be
shown because that 'would arouse bad impulses.' It was not till
the human body was entirely withdrawn from my sight and after I
was constantly told that there was something improper behind
clothes, that I was able to understand this.... Until then I had
not known that a naked body, by the mere fact of being naked,
could arouse erotic feelings. I had known erotic feelings, but
they had not arisen from the sight of the naked body, but
gradually blossomed from the union of our souls." And he draws
the final moral that, if only for the sake of our children, we
must learn to educate ourselves.

Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, p. 140), speaking in entirely the
same sense as Gerhard, remarks that prudery may be either caused
or cured in children. It may be caused by undue anxiety in
covering their bodies and hiding from them the bodies of others.
It may be cured by making them realize that there is nothing in
the body that is unnatural and that we need be ashamed of, and by
encouraging bathing of the sexes in common. He points out (p.
512) the advantages of allowing children to be acquainted with
the adult forms which they will themselves some day assume, and
condemns the conduct of those foolish persons who assume that
children already possess the adult's erotic feelings about the
body. That is so far from being the case that children are
frequently unable to distinguish the sex of other children apart
from their clothes.

At the Mannheim Congress of the G