when we were learning to skate, and our very dreams
were a medley of ice and bumps? How could we worry over 'natural
laws' in the face of a tyrannical interdict which lessened our
chances of breaking our necks by forbidding us to coast down a
hill covered with trees? The children to be pitied, the children
whose minds become infected with unwholesome curiosity are those
who lack cheerful recreation, religious teaching, and the fine
corrective of work. A playground or a swimming pool will do more
to keep them mentally and morally sound than scores of lectures on
sex-hygiene.

[Sidenote: Personal teaching approved.]

"The world is wide, and a great deal is happening in it. I do not
plead for ignorance, but for the gradual and harmonious broadening
of the field of knowledge, and for a more careful consideration of
ways and means. There are subjects which may be taught in class,
and subjects which commend themselves to individual teaching.
There are topics which admit of _plein-air_ handling, and topics
which civilized man, as apart from his artless brother of the
jungles, has veiled with reticence. There are truths which may be,
and should be, privately imparted by a father, a mother, family
doctor, or an experienced teacher; but which young people cannot
advantageously acquire from the platform, the stage, the moving
picture gallery, the novel or the ubiquitous monthly magazine."

There is much in Miss Repplier's paragraphs which will win hearty
approval from those who have come to believe, as advocated throughout
this series of lectures, in conservative teaching of sex-hygiene and a
larger outlook for sex-education.

[Sidenote: Current frankness not due to sex-education.]

No doubt there has been too great a loss of a certain kind of reticence
and a substitution of crude frankness, but it has not been caused by
the sex-education movement. On the contrary, there are two evident
sources of the plain speech of which Miss Repplier and others have
complained: First, the commercializing of sex by novelists, dramatists,
theater managers, and publishers--many of whom are reaping a golden
harvest and few of whom have any sincere interest in promulgating
sexual information to any end except their own pocketbooks. Second, the
development of the feminist movement which has its deepest foundation
in the age-old sexual misunderstandings of wom