dult, the feeling of respect for
man's deepest emotions fades away. Man and woman lose the instinctive
shyness in touching on this sacred ground, and as the organic desires
push and push toward it, the youth soon discovers that the barriers to
the forbidden ground are removed and that in their place stands a
simple signal with a suggestive word of warning against some easily
avoided traps.

From a psychological point of view the right policy would be to reduce
the external temptations, above all, the opportunities for contact.
Coeducation, for instance, was morally without difficulties twenty
years ago, but it is unfit in high schools and colleges for the
eastern part of the nation in the atmosphere of to-day. Moreover, the
aesthetic spirit ought to be educated systematically, and above all,
the whole education of the youth ought to be built on discipline; the
lesson by which the youth learns to overcome the desire and to inhibit
the will is the most essential for the young American of to-morrow.
The policy of silence has never meant that a girl should grow up
without the consciousness that the field of sexual facts exists in our
social world; on the contrary, those feelings of shame and decency
which belong to the steady learning of a clean child from the days of
the nursery have strongly impressed on the young soul that such
regions are real, but that they must not be approached by curiosity or
self-seeking wilfulness. This instinct itself brought something of
ideal value, of respect and even of reverence into the most trivial
life, however often it became ruined by foul companionship. To
strengthen this instinctive emotion of mysterious respect, which makes
the young mind shrink from brutal intrusion, will remain the wisest
policy, as long as we cannot change that automatic mechanism of human
nature by which the sexual thought stimulates the sexual organs. The
masses are, of course, in favour of the opposite programme, which is
in itself only another symptom of the erotic atmosphere into which the
new antipuritanic nation has come. That mechanism of the nervous
system furnishes them a pleasant excitement when they read and hear
the discussions and plays which bristle with sexual instruction. The
magazines which, with the best intentions, fight for the new policy,
easily find millions of readers; the plays with their erotic overflow
and the moral ending are crowded, and mostly by those who hardly need
the instruction