f gossiping in
curiosity, but the starting point has generally been a change in the
life habits. When new wealth has come to a people with new liberties
and new desires for enjoyment, the great periods of sexual frivolity
have started and brought secondarily the discussions of sex problems,
which intensified the immoral life. On the other hand, when a nation
in the richness of its life has been brought before new great
responsibilities, great social earthquakes and revolutions, great wars
for national honour, or great new intellectual or religious ideals,
then the sexual tension has been released, the attention has been
withdrawn from the frivolous concerns, and the people have settled
down soberly to a life of modesty and morality, which brought with it
as a natural consequence the policy of reverence and silence. The new
situation in America, and to a certain degree all over the world, has
come in, too, not through the silence of the preceding generation,
but by the sudden change from agricultural to industrial life, with
its gigantic cumulation of capital, with its widespread new wealth,
with its new ideas of social liberty, with its fading religion, with
its technical wonders of luxury and comfort. This new age, which takes
its orders from Broadway with its cabarets and tango dances, must
ridicule the silence of our fathers and denounce it as a conspiracy.
It needs the sexual discussions, as it craves the lurid music and the
sensual dances, until finally even the most earnest energies, those of
social reform and of hygiene, of intellectual culture and of artistic
effort, are forced into the service of this antimoral fashion.

Some sober spectators argue that as things have gone to this extent,
it might be wise to try the new policy as an experiment, because
matters cannot become worse than they are to-day. But those who yield
to the new advice so readily ought again to look into the pages of
history, or ought at least to study the situation in some other
countries before they proclaim that the climax has been reached. It
may be true that it would not be possible to transform still more New
York hotels into dancing halls, since the innovation of this fashion,
which suggests the dancing epidemics of mediaeval times, has reached
practically every fashionable hostelry. Yet we may be only at the
beginning, as in this vicious circle of craving for sensual life and
talking about sexual problems the erotic transformation of