the moral
struggle of woman's soul without an attempt to answer her burning
questions."

On the other hand we find medical writers not only asserting with much
moral fervor that sexual intercourse outside marriage is always and
altogether unnecessary, but declaring, moreover, the harmlessness or even
the advantages of sexual abstinence.

Ribbing, the Swedish professor, in his _Hygiene Sexuelle_,
advocates sexual abstinence outside marriage, and asserts its
harmlessness. Gilles de la Tourette, Fere, and Augagneur in
France agree. In Germany Fuerbringer (Senator and Kaminer, _Health
and Disease in Relation to Marriage_, vol. i, p. 228) asserts
that continence is possible and necessary, though admitting that
it may, however, mean serious mischief in exceptional cases.
Eulenburg (_Sexuale Neuropathie_, p. 14) doubts whether anyone,
who otherwise lived a reasonable life, ever became ill, or more
precisely neurasthenic, through sexual abstinence. Hegar,
replying to the arguments of Bebel in his well-known book on
women, denies that sexual abstinence can ever produce satyriasis
or nymphomania. Naecke, who has frequently discussed the problem
of sexual abstinence (e.g., _Archiv fuer Kriminal-Anthropologie_,
1903, Heft 1, and _Sexual-Probleme_, June, 1908), maintains that
sexual abstinence can, at most, produce rare and slight
unfavorable results, and that it is no more likely to produce
insanity, even in predisposed individuals, than are the opposite
extremes of sexual excess and masturbation. He adds that, so far
as his own observations are concerned, the patients in asylums
suffer scarcely at all from their compulsory sexual abstinence.

It is in England, however, that the virtues of sexual abstinence
have been most loudly and emphatically proclaimed, sometimes
indeed with considerable lack of cautious qualification. Acton,
in his _Reproductive Organs_, sets forth the traditional English
view, as well as Beale in his _Morality and the Moral Question_.
A more distinguished representative of the same view was Paget,
who, in his lecture on "Sexual Hypochondriasis," coupled sexual
intercourse with "theft or lying." Sir William Gowers (_Syphilis
and the Nervous System_, 1892, p. 126) also proclaims the
advantages of "unbroken chastity," more especially as a method of
avoiding syphilis. He is