The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Task of Social Hygiene, by Havelock Ellis

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Title: The Task of Social Hygiene

Author: Havelock Ellis

Release Date: July 17, 2007 [eBook #22090]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE***

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THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

* * * * *

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

STUDIES IN THE PSYCHOLOGY
OF SEX. SIX VOLS.

THE NEW SPIRIT

AFFIRMATIONS

MAN AND WOMAN

THE CRIMINAL

THE WORLD OF DREAMS

THE SOUL OF SPAIN

IMPRESSIONS AND COMMENTS

ESSAYS IN WAR-TIME. ETC.

* * * * *

THE TASK OF SOCIAL HYGIENE

by

HAVELOCK ELLIS

Author of "The Soul of Spain"; "The World of Dreams"; etc.

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
1916

Printed in Great Britain.

PREFACE

The study of social hygiene means the study of those things which
concern the welfare of human beings living in societies. There can,
therefore, be no study more widely important or more generally
interesting. I fear, however, that by many persons social hygiene is
vaguely regarded either as a mere extension of sanitary science, or else
as an effort to set up an intolerable bureaucracy to oversee every
action of our lives, and perhaps even to breed us as cattle are bred.

That is certainly not the point of view from which this book has been
written. Plato and Rabelais, Campanella and More, have been among those
who announced the principles of social hygiene here set forth. There
must be a social order, all these great pioneers recognized, but the
health of society, like the health of the body, is marked by expansion
as much as by restriction, and, the striving for order is only justified
because without order there can be no freedom. If it were not the
mission of social hygiene to bring a new joy and a new freedom into life
I should not have concerned myself with the writing of this book.