nkness.]

"It was never meant by those who first cautiously advised a
clearer understanding of sexual relations and hygienic rules that
everybody should chatter freely respecting these grave issues;
that teachers, lecturers, novelists, story-writers, militants,
dramatists, social workers, and magazine editors should copiously
impart all they know, or assume they know, to the world. The lack
of restraint, the lack of balance, the lack of soberness and
common sense were never more apparent than in the obsession of sex
which has set us all ababbling about matters once excluded from
the amenities of conversation.

"Knowledge is the cry. Crude, undigested knowledge, without limit
and without reserve. Give it to boys, give it to girls, give it to
children. No other force is taken account of by the visionaries
who--in defiance, or in ignorance of history--believe that evil
understood is evil conquered.

"We hear too much about the thirst for knowledge from people keen
to quench it. Dr. Edward L. Keyes, president of the Society of
Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis, advocates the teaching of
sex-hygiene to children, because he thinks that it is the kind of
information that children are eagerly seeking. 'What is this
topic,' he asks, 'that all these little ones are questioning over,
mulling over, fidgeting over, worrying over? Ask your own
memories.'

[Sidenote: One child's life.]

"I do ask my memory in vain for the answer Dr. Keyes anticipates.
A child's life is so full, and everything that enters it seems of
supreme importance. I fidgeted over my hair which would not curl.
I worried over my examples which never came out right. I mulled
(though unacquainted with the word) over every piece of sewing put
into my incapable fingers, which could not be trained to hold a
needle. I imagined I was stolen by brigands, and became--by virtue
and intelligence--spouse of a patriotic outlaw in a frontierless
land. I asked artless questions which brought me into discredit
with my teachers, as, for example, who 'massacred' St.
Bartholomew. But vital facts, the great laws of propagation, were
matters of but casual concern crowded out of my life and out of my
companions' lives (in a convent boarding-school) by the more
stirring happenings of every day. How could we fidget over
obstetrics