riters in the popular magazines
cannot do better than to repeat the message, until every adult and
every child knows where the enemy may be found and helps to destroy
the insects and to avoid the dangers of contact. This is the formula
after which those reformers want to work who hold the old-fashioned
policy of silence in sexual matters to be obsolete. Of course they aim
toward a mild beginning. It may start with beautiful descriptions of
blossoms and of fruits, of eggs and of hens, before it comes to the
account of sexual intercourse and human embryos, but if the talking is
to have any effect superior to not talking, the concrete sexual
relations must be impressed upon the imagination of the girl before
she becomes sixteen years of age.

Here is the real place for the psychological objection. It is not true
that you can bring such sexual knowledge into the mind of a girl in
the period of her development with the same detachment with which you
can deposit in her mind the knowledge about mosquitoes and houseflies.
That prophylactic information concerning the influence of the insects
on diseases remains an isolated group of ideas, which has no other
influence on the mind than the intended one, the influence of guiding
the actions in a reasonable direction. The information about her
sexual organs and the effects on the sexual organism of men may also
have as one of its results a certain theoretical willingness to avoid
social dangers. But the far stronger immediate effect is the
psychophysiological reverberation in the whole youthful organism with
strong reactions on its blood vessels and on its nerves. The
individual differences are extremely great here. On every social level
we find cool natures whose frigidity would inhibit strong influences
in these organic directions. But they are the girls who have least to
fear anyhow. With a much larger number the information, however slowly
and tactfully imparted, must mean a breaking down of inhibitions which
held sexual feelings and sexual curiosity in check.

The new ideas become the centre of attention, the whole world begins
to appear in a new light, everything which was harmless becomes full
of meaning and suggestion, new problems awake, and the new ideas
irradiate over the whole mental mechanism. The new problems again
demand their answers. Just the type of girl to whom the lure might
become dangerous will be pushed to ever new inquiries, and if the
policy of information