ous
material, one covering the breasts with a band over the
shoulders, and the other covering the abdomen below the navel and
drawn between the legs. This minimal costume, while neither ideal
nor aesthetic, adequately covers the sexual regions of the body,
while leaving the arms, waist, hips, and legs entirely free.

There finally remains the moral aspect of nakedness. Although this has
been emphasized by many during the past half century it is still
unfamiliar to the majority. The human body can never be a little thing.
The wise educator may see to it that boys and girls are brought up in a
natural and wholesome familiarity with each other, but a certain terror
and beauty must always attach to the spectacle of the body, a mixed
attraction and repulsion. Because it has this force it naturally calls out
the virtue of those who take part in the spectacle, and makes impossible
any soft compliance to emotion. Even if we admit that the spectacle of
nakedness is a challenge to passion it is still a challenge that calls
out the ennobling qualities of self-control. It is but a poor sort of
virtue that lies in fleeing into the desert from things that we fear may
have in them a temptation. We have to learn that it is even worse to
attempt to create a desert around us in the midst of civilization. We
cannot dispense with passions if we would; reason, as Holbach said, is the
art of choosing the right passions, and education the art of sowing and
cultivating them in human hearts. The spectacle of nakedness has its moral
value in teaching us to learn to enjoy what we do not possess, a lesson
which is an essential part of the training for any kind of fine social
life. The child has to learn to look at flowers and not pluck them; the
man has to learn to look at a woman's beauty and not desire to possess it.
The joyous conquest over that "erotic kleptomania," as Ellen Key has well
said, reveals the blossoming of a fine civilization. We fancy the conquest
is difficult, even impossibly difficult. But it is not so. This impulse,
like other human impulses, tends under natural conditions to develop
temperately and wholesomely. We artificially press a stupid and brutal
hand on it, and it is driven into the two unnatural extremes of repression
and license, one extreme as foul as the other.

To those who have been bred under bad conditions, it may indeed seem
hopeless to attempt to rise to the level of the Greeks and the oth