people. It
must be remembered that the great majority of people involved in the
above figures are of the peasant and laboring classes; conditions are
quite different among women of the educated classes. These must
ultimately set the moral standards for the masses.

Our American conditions are quite different, especially outside of the
large cosmopolitan cities. It is impossible not to believe in the moral
integrity of the great majority of unmarried women in America.
Certainly even in our worst communities we have no such general
immorality of women as above European figures suggest. Perhaps
wholesale prostitution in which one public woman may be the mistress of
ten, twenty, or even fifty men, may tend to protect any equal number of
American women; whereas in Europe a peasant woman would probably be for
a time the paramour of one man, thus tending to make equal numbers of
immoral men and women.

However, it matters nothing for our present purposes what may be the
explanation of conditions of sexual promiscuity here or abroad. The one
great fact is that our national code of morality is a monogamic one,
approved as ideal even by many of those who fail to live strictly in
harmony with its dictates. Hence, all Americans who are prominently
interested in sex-education believe that it should aim to make our
young people more ready to accept and understand morality according to
the monogamic ideal.

Those who are interested in this problem of morality as related to
marriage should read Foerster's "Marriage and the Sex Problem."

[Sidenote: Relation of sex-hygiene and ethics.]

Among those who see the need of teaching sex-ethics as a part of the
larger outlook of sex-education, there are two points of view: (1)
those who favor the teaching of sex-ethics with the hope of preventing
the hygienic problems arising from immorality, and (2) those who
believe in sexual morality for its own sake or as an accepted code of
conduct.

The founders of the American Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis
placed sanitation first in the name and stated in the constitution that
"the object of this Society is to limit the spread of diseases which
have their origin in the Social Evil. It proposes to study every means,
sanitary, moral, and administrative, which promise to be most effective
for this purpose." Most of the papers that have been read at the
meetings of the Society have emphasized the sanitary aim as primary,
and the moral a