, with Teutonic grimness, thrusts over the footlights the
lesson that death and degradation may be the fate of a group of gifted
school-children, because of the cowardly reticence of their parents.

A year ago the Bishop of London gathered together a number of
influential people and laid before them his convictions that the root of
the social evil lay in so-called "parental modesty," and that in the
quickening of the parental conscience lay the hope for the "lifting up
of England's moral tone which has for so long been the despair of
England's foremost men."

In America the eighth year-book of the National Society for the
Scientific Study of Education treats of this important subject with
great ability, massing the agencies and methods in impressive array.
Many other educational journals and organized societies could be cited
as expressing a new conscience in regard to this world-old evil. The
expert educational opinion which they represent is practically agreed
that for older children the instruction should not be confined to
biology and hygiene, but may come quite naturally in history and
literature, which record and portray the havoc wrought by the sexual
instinct when uncontrolled, and also show that, when directed and
spiritualized, it has become an inspiration to the loftiest devotions
and sacrifices. The youth thus taught sees this primal instinct not only
as an essential to the continuance of the race, but also, when it is
transmuted to the highest ends, as a fundamental factor in social
progress. The entire subject is broadened out in his mind as he learns
that his own struggle is a common experience. He is able to make his own
interpretations and to combat the crude inferences of his patronizing
companions. After all, no young person will be able to control his
impulses and to save himself from the grosser temptations, unless he has
been put under the sway of nobler influences. Perhaps we have yet to
learn that the inhibitions of character as well as its reinforcements
come most readily through idealistic motives.

Certainly all the great religions of the world have recognized youth's
need of spiritual help during the trying years of adolescence. The
ceremonies of the earliest religions deal with this instinct almost to
the exclusion of others, and all later religions attempt to provide the
youth with shadowy weapons for the struggle which lies ahead of him, for
the wise men in every age have known that only