the group of 56 who stood lowest in athletic power the percentage
of breast-fed fell to 57 (for an average of only three months).

The advantages for an infant of being suckled by its mother are
greater than can be accounted for by the mere fact of being
suckled rather than hand-fed. This has been shown by Vitrey (_De
la Mortalite Infantile_, These de Lyon, 1907), who found from the
statistics of the Hotel-Dieu at Lyons, that infants suckled by
their mothers have a mortality of only 12 per cent., but if
suckled by strangers, the mortality rises to 33 per cent. It may
be added that, while suckling is essential to the complete
well-being of the child, it is highly desirable for the sake of
the mother's health also. (Some important statistics are
summarized in a paper on "Infantile Mortality" in _British
Medical Journal_, Nov. 2, 1907), while the various aspects of
suckling have been thoroughly discussed by Bollinger, "Ueber
Saeuglings-Sterblichkeit und die Erbliche functionelle Atrophie
der menschlichen Milchdruese" (_Correspondenzblatt Deutschen
Gesellschaft Anthropologie_, Oct., 1899).

It appears that in Sweden, in the middle of the eighteenth
century, it was a punishable offense for a woman to give her baby
the bottle when she was able to suckle it. In recent years Prof.
Anton von Menger, of Vienna, has argued (in his _Burgerliche
Recht und die Besitzlosen Klassen_) that the future generation
has the right to make this claim, and he proposes that every
mother shall be legally bound to suckle her child unless her
inability to do so has been certified by a physician. E.A.
Schroeder (_Das Recht in der Geschlechtlichen Ordnung_, 1893, p.
346) also argued that a mother should be legally bound to suckle
her infant for at least nine months, unless solid grounds could
be shown to the contrary, and this demand, which seems reasonable
and natural, since it is a mother's privilege as well as her duty
to suckle her infant when able to do so, has been insistently
made by others also. It has been supported from the legal side by
Weinberg (_Mutterschutz_, Sept., 1907). In France the Loi Roussel
forbids a woman to act as a wet-nurse until her child is seven
months old, and this has had an excellent effect in lowering
infantile mortality (A. Allee, _Puericulture et la Loi Roussel_,
These de Paris, 1908). In some parts of Germany manufacturers are
compelled to set up a suckling-room in the factory, where mothers
can give the breast to the child in the intervals of work. The
control and upkeep of these rooms, with provision of doctors and
nurses, is undertaken by the municipality (_Sexual-Probleme_,
Sept., 1908, p. 573).

As things are to-day in modern industrial countries the righting of these
wrongs cannot be left to Nature, that is, to the ignorant and untrained
impulses of persons who live in a whirl of artificial life where the voice
of instinct is drowned. The mother, we are accustomed to think, may be
trusted to see to the welfare of her child, and it is unnecessary, or even
"immoral," to come to her assistance. Yet there are few things, I think,
more pathetic than the sight of a young Lancashire mother who works in the
mills, when she has to stay at home to nurse her sick child. She is used
to rise before day-break to go to the mill; she has scarcely seen her
child by the light of the sun, she knows nothing of its necessities, the
hands that are so skilful to catch the loom cannot soothe the child. The
mother gazes down at it in vague, awkward, speechless misery. It is not a
sight one can ever forget.

It is France that is taking the lead in the initiation of the scientific
and practical movements for the care of the young child before and after
birth, and it is in France that we may find the germs of nearly all the
methods now becoming adopted for arresting infantile mortality. The
village system of Villiers-le-Duc, near Dijon in the Cote d'Or, has proved
a germ of this fruitful kind. Here every pregnant woman not able to secure
the right conditions for her own life and that of the child she is
bearing, is able to claim the assistance of the village authorities; she
is entitled, without payment, to the attendance of a doctor and midwife
and to one franc a day during her confinement. The measures adopted in
this village have practically abolished both maternal and infantile
mortality. A few years ago Dr. Samson Moore, the medical officer of health
for Huddersfield, heard of this village, and Mr. Benjamin Broadbent, the
Mayor of Huddersfield, visited Villiers-le-Duc. It was resolved to
initiate in Huddersfield a movement for combating infant mortality.
Henceforth arose what is known as the Huddersfield scheme, a scheme which
has been fruitful in splendid results. The points of the Huddersfield
scheme are: (1) compulsory notification of births within forty-eight
hours; (2) the appointment of lady assistant medical officers of help to
visit the home, inquire, advise, and assist; (3) the organized aid of
voluntary lady workers in subordination to the municipal part of the
scheme; (4) appeal to the medical officer of help when the baby, not being
under medical care, fails to thrive. The infantile mortality of
Huddersfield has been very greatly reduced by this scheme.[16]

The Huddersfield scheme may be said to be the origin of the
English Notification of Births Act, which came into operation in
1908. This Act represents, in England, the national inauguration
of a scheme for the betterment of the race, the ultimate results
of which it is impossible to foresee. When this Act comes into
universal action every baby of the land will be entitled--legally
and not by individual caprice or philanthropic condescension--to
medical attention from the day of birth, and every mother will
have at hand the counsel of an educated woman in touch with the
municipal authorities. There could be no greater triumph for
medical science, for national efficiency, and the cause of
humanity generally. Even on the lower financial plane, it is easy
to see that an enormous saving of public and private money will
thus be effected. The Act is adoptive, and not compulsory. This
was a wise precaution, for an Act of this kind cannot be
effectual unless it is carried out thoroughly by the community
adopting it, and it will not be adopted until a community has
clearly realized its advantages and the methods of attaining
them.

An important adjunct of this organization is the School for
Mothers. Such schools, which are now beginning to spring up
everywhere, may be said to have their origins in the
_Consultations de Nourrissons_ (with their offshoot the _Goutte
de Lait_), established by Professor Budin in 1892, which have
spread all over France and been widely influential for good. At
the _Consultations_ infants are examined and weighed weekly, and
the mothers advised and encouraged to suckle their children. The
_Gouttes_ are practically milk dispensaries where infants for
whom breast-feeding is impossible are fed with milk under medical
supervision. Schools for Mothers represent an enlargement of the
same scheme, covering a variety of subjects which it is necessary
for a mother to know. Some of the first of these schools were
established at Bonn, at the Bavarian town of Weissenberg, and in
Ghent. At some of the Schools for Mothers, and notably at Ghent
(described by Mrs. Bertrand Russell in the _Nineteenth Century_,
1906), the important step has been taken of giving training to
young girls from fourteen to eighteen; they receive instruction
in infant anatomy and physiology, in the preparation of
sterilized milk, in weighing children, in taking temperatures and
making charts, in managing creches, and after two years are able
to earn a salary. In various parts of England, schools for young
mothers and girls on these lines are now being established, first
in London, under the auspices of Dr. F.J. Sykes, Medical Officer
of Health for St. Pancreas (see, e.g., _A School For Mothers_,
1908, describing an establishment of this kind at Somers Town,
with a preface by Sir Thomas Barlow; an account of recent
attempts to improve the care of infants in London will also be
found in the _Lancet_, Sept. 26, 1908). It may be added that some
English municipalities have established depots for supplying
mothers cheaply with good milk. Such depots are, however, likely
to be more mischievous than beneficial if they promote the
substitution of hand-feeding for suckling. They should never be
established except in connection with Schools for Mothers, where
an educational influence may be exerted, and no mother should be
supplied with milk unless she presents a medical certificate
showing that she is unable to nourish her child (Byers, "Medical
Women and Public Health Questions," _British Medical Journal_,
Oct. 6, 1906). It is noteworthy that in England the local
authorities will shortly be empowered by law to establish Schools
for Mothers.

The great benefits produced by these institutions in France, both
in diminishing the infant mortality and in promoting the
education of mothers and their pride and interest in their
children, have been set forth in two Paris theses by G. Chaignon
(_Organisation des Consultations de Nourrissons a la Campagne_,
1908), and Alcide Alexandre (_Consultation de Nourrissons et
Goutte de Lait d'Arques_, 1908).

The movement is now spreading throughout Europe, and an
International Union has been formed, including all the
institutions specially founded for the protection of child life
and the promotion of puericulture. The permanent committee is in
Brussels, and a Congress of Infant Protection (_Goutte de Lait_)
is held every two years.

It will be seen that all the movements now being set in action for the
improvement of the race through the child and the child's mother,
recognize the intimacy of the relation between the mother and her child
and are designed to aid her, even if necessary by the exercise of some
pressure, in performing her natural functions in relation to her child. To
the theoretical philanthropist, eager to reform the world on paper,
nothing seems simpler than to cure the present evils of child-rearing by
setting up State nurseries which are at once to relieve mothers of
everything connected with the production of the men of the future beyond
the pleasure--if such it happens to be--of conceiving them and the trouble
of bearing them, and at the same time to rear them up independently of the
home, in a wholesome, economical, and scientific manner.[17] Nothing seems
simpler, but from the fundamental psychological standpoint nothing is
falser. The idea of a State which is outside the community is but a
survival in another form of that antiquated notion which compelled Louis
XIV to declare "L'Etat c'est moi!" A State which admits that the
individuals composing it are incompetent to perform their own most sacred
and intimate functions, and takes upon itself to perform them instead,
attempts a task which would be undesirable, even if it were possible of
achievement. It must always be remembered that a State which proposes to
relieve its constituent members of their natural functions and
responsibilities attempts something quite different from the State which
seeks to aid its members to fulfil their own biological and social
functions more adequately. A State which enables its mothers to rest when
they are child-bearing is engaged in a reasonable task; a State which
takes over its mothers' children is reducing philanthropy to absurdity. It
is easy to realize this if we consider the inevitable course of
circumstances under a system of "State-nurseries." The child would be
removed from its natural mother at the earliest age, but some one has to
perform the mother's duties; the substitute must therefore be properly
trained for such duties; and in exercising them under favorable
circumstances a maternal relationship is developed between the child and
the "mother," who doubtless possesses natural maternal instincts but has
no natural maternal bond to the child she is mothering. Such a
relationship tends to become on both sides practically and emotionally the
real relationship. We very often have opportunity of seeing how
unsatisfactory such a relationship becomes. The artificial mother is
deprived of a child she had begun to feel her own; the child's emotional
relationships are upset, split and distorted; the real mother has the
bitterness of feeling that for her child she is not the real mother. Would
it not have been much better for all if the State had encouraged the vast
army of women it had trained for the position of mothering other women's
children, to have, instead, children of their own? The women who are
incapable of mothering their own children could then be trained to refrain
from bearing them.

Ellen Key (in her _Century of the Child_, and elsewhere) has
advocated for all young women a year of compulsory "service,"
analogous to the compulsory military service imposed in most
countries on young men. During this period the girl would be
trained in rational housekeeping, in the principles of hygiene,
in the care of the sick, and especially in the care of infants
and all that concerns the physical and psychic development of
children. The principle of this proposal has since been widely
accepted. Marie von Schmid (in her _Mutterdienst_, 1907) goes so
far as to advocate a general training of young women in such
duties, carried on in a kind of enlarged and improved midwifery
school. The service would last a year, and the young woman would
then be for three years in the reserves, and liable to be called
up for duty. There is certainly much to be said for such a
proposal, considerably more than is to be said for compulsory
military service. For while it is very doubtful whether a man
will ever be called on to fight, most women are liable to be
called on to exercise household duties or to look after children,
whether for themselves or for other people.


FOOTNOTES:

[1] It is not, of course, always literally true that each parent supplies
exactly half the heredity, for, as we see among animals generally, the
offspring may sometimes approach more nearly to one parent, sometimes to
the other, while among plants, as De Vries and others have shown, the
heredity may be still more unequally divided.

[2] It should scarcely be necessary to say that to assert that motherhood
is a woman's supreme function is by no means to assert that her activities
should be confined to the home. That is an opinion which may now be
regarded as almost extinct even among those who most glorify the function
of woman as mother. As Friedrich Naumann and others have very truly
pointed out, a woman is not adequately equipped to fulfil her functions as
mother and trainer of children unless she has lived in the world and
exercised a vocation.

[3] "Were the capacities of the brain and the heart equal in the sexes,"
Lily Braun (_Die Frauenfrage_, page 207) well says, "the entry of women
into public life would be of no value to humanity, and would even lead to
a still wilder competition. Only the recognition that the entire nature of
woman is different from that of man, that it signifies a new vivifying
principle in human life, makes the women's movement, in spite of the
misconception of its enemies and its friends, a social revolution" (see
also Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, 1904, especially Ch.
XVIII).

[4] The word "puericulture" was invented by Dr. Caron in 1866 to signify
the culture of children after birth. It was Pinard, the distinguished
French obstetrician, who, in 1895, gave it a larger and truer significance
by applying it to include the culture of children before birth. It is now
defined as "the science which has for its end the search for the knowledge
relative to the reproduction, the preservation, and the amelioration of
the human race" (Pechin, _La Puericulture avant la Naissance_, These de
Paris, 1908).

[5] In _La Grossesse_ (pp. 450 et seq.) Bouchacourt has discussed the
problems of puericulture at some length.

[6] The importance of antenatal puericulture was fully recognized in China
a thousand years ago. Thus Madame Cheng wrote at that time concerning the
education of the child: "Even before birth his education may begin; and,
therefore, the prospective mother of old, when lying down, lay straight;
when sitting down, sat upright; and when standing, stood erect. She would
not taste strange flavors, nor have anything to do with spiritualism; if
her food were not cut straight she would not eat it, and if her mat were
not set straight, she would not sit upon it. She would not look at any
objectionable sight, nor listen to any objectionable sound, nor utter any
rude word, nor handle any impure thing. At night she studied some
canonical work, by day she occupied herself with ceremonies and music.
Therefore, her sons were upright and eminent for their talents and
virtues; such was the result of antenatal training" (H.A. Giles, "Woman in
Chinese Literature," _Nineteenth Century_, Nov., 1904).

[7] Max Bartels, "Islaendischer Brauch," etc., _Zeitschrift fuer
Ethnologie_, 1900, p. 65. A summary of the customs of various peoples in
regard to pregnancy is given by Ploss and Bartels, _Das Weib_, Sect. XXIX.

[8] On the influence of alcohol during pregnancy on the embryo, see, e.g.,
G. Newman, _Infant Mortality_, pp. 72-77. W.C. Sullivan (_Alcoholism_,
1906, Ch. XI), summarizes the evidence showing that alcohol is a factor in
human degeneration.

[9] There is even reason to believe that the alcoholism of the mother's
father may impair her ability as a mother. Bunge (_Die Zunehmende
Unfaehigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu Stillen_, fifth edition, 1907), from
an investigation extending over 2,000 families, finds that chronic
alcoholic poisoning in the father is the chief cause of the daughter's
inability to suckle, this inability not usually being recovered in
subsequent generations. Bunge has, however, been opposed by Dr. Agnes
Bluhm, "Die Stillungsnot," _Zeitschrift fuer Soziale Medizin_, 1908 (fully
summarized by herself in _Sexual-Probleme_, Jan., 1909).

[10] See, e.g., T. Arthur Helme, "The Unborn Child," _British Medical
Journal_, Aug. 24, 1907. Nutrition should, of course, be adequate. Noel
Paton has shown (_Lancet_, July 4, 1903) that defective nutrition of the
pregnant woman diminishes the weight of the offspring.

[11] Debreyne, _Moechialogie_, p. 277. And from the Protestant side see
Northcote (_Christianity and Sex Problems_, Ch. IX), who permits sexual
intercourse during pregnancy.

[12] See Appendix A to the third volume of these _Studies_; also Ploss and
Bartels, loc. cit.

[13] Thus one lady writes: "I have only had one child, but I may say that
during pregnancy the desire for union was much stronger, for the whole
time, than at any other period." Bouchacourt (_La Grossesse_, pp. 180-183)
states that, as a rule, sexual desire is not diminished by pregnancy, and
is occasionally increased.

[14] This "inconvenience" remains to-day a stumbling-block with many
excellent authorities. "Except when there is a tendency to miscarriage,"
says Kossmann (Senator and Kaminer, _Health and Disease in Relation to
Marriage_, vol. i, p. 257), "we must be very guarded in ordering
abstinence from intercourse during pregnancy," and Ballantyne (_The
Foetus_, p. 475) cautiously remarks that the question is difficult to
decide. Forel also (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, fourth edition, p. 81), who is
not prepared to advocate complete sexual abstinence during a normal
pregnancy, admits that it is a rather difficult question.

[15] This point is discussed, for instance, by Seropian in a Paris Thesis
(_Frequence comparee des Causes de l'Accouchement Premature_, 1907); he
concludes that coitus during pregnancy is a more frequent cause of
premature confinement than is commonly supposed, especially in primiparae,
and markedly so by the ninth month.

[16] "Infantile Mortality: The Huddersfield Scheme," _British Medical
Journal_, Dec., 1907; Samson Moore, "Infant Mortality," ib., August 29,
1908.

[17] Ellen Key has admirably dealt with proposals of this kind (as put
forth by C.P. Stetson) in her Essays "On Love and Marriage." In opposition
to such proposals Ellen Key suggests that such women as have been properly
trained for maternal duties and are unable entirely to support themselves
while exercising them should be subsidized by the State during the child's
first three years of life. It may be added that in Leipzig the plan of
subsidizing mothers who (under proper medical and other supervision)
suckle their infants has already been introduced.




CHAPTER II.

SEXUAL EDUCATION.

Nurture Necessary as Well as Breed--Precocious Manifestations of the
Sexual Impulse--Are They to be Regarded as Normal?--The Sexual Play of
Children--The Emotion of Love in Childhood--Are Town Children More
Precocious Sexually Than Country Children?--Children's Ideas Concerning
the Origin of Babies--Need for Beginning the Sexual Education of Children
in Early Years--The Importance of Early Training in Responsibility--Evil
of the Old Doctrine of Silence in Matters of Sex--The Evil Magnified When
Applied to Girls--The Mother the Natural and Best Teacher--The Morbid
Influence of Artificial Mystery in Sex Matters--Books on Sexual
Enlightenment of the Young--Nature of the Mother's Task--Sexual Education
in the School--The Value of Botany--Zooelogy--Sexual Education After
Puberty--The Necessity of Counteracting Quack Literature--Danger of
Neglecting to Prepare for the First Onset of Menstruation--The Right
Attitude Towards Woman's Sexual Life--The Vital Necessity of the Hygiene
of Menstruation During Adolescence--Such Hygiene Compatible with the
Educational and Social Equality of the Sexes--The Invalidism of Women
Mainly Due to Hygienic Neglect--Good Influence of Physical Training on
Women and Bad Influence of Athletics--The Evils of Emotional
Suppression--Need of Teaching the Dignity of Sex--Influence of These
Factors on a Woman's Fate in Marriage--Lectures and Addresses on Sexual
Hygiene--The Doctor's Part in Sexual Education--Pubertal Initiation Into
the Ideal World--The Place of the Religious and Ethical Teacher--The
Initiation Rites of Savages Into Manhood and Womanhood--The Sexual
Influence of Literature--The Sexual Influence of Art.


It may seem to some that in attaching weight to the ancestry, the
parentage, the conception, the gestation, even the first infancy, of the
child we are wandering away from the sphere of the psychology of sex. That
is far from being the case. We are, on the contrary, going to the root of
sex. All our growing knowledge tends to show that, equally with his
physical nature, the child's psychic nature is based on breed and nurture,
on the quality of the stocks he belongs to, and on the care taken at the
early moments when care counts for most, to preserve the fine quality of
those stocks.

It must, of course, be remembered that the influences of both
breed and nurture are alike influential on the fate of the
individual. The influence of nurture is so obvious that few are
likely to under-rate it. The influence of breed, however, is less
obvious, and we may still meet with persons so ill informed, and
perhaps so prejudiced, as to deny it altogether. The growth of
our knowledge in this matter, by showing how subtle and
penetrative is the influence of heredity, cannot fail to dispel
this mischievous notion. No sound civilization is possible except
in a community which in the mass is not only well-nurtured but
well-bred. And in no part of life so much as in the sexual
relationships is the influence of good breeding more decisive. An
instructive illustration may be gleaned from the minute and
precise history of his early life furnished to me by a highly
cultured Russian gentleman. He was brought up in childhood with
his own brothers and sisters and a little girl of the same age
who had been adopted from infancy, the child of a prostitute who
had died soon after the infant's birth. The adopted child was
treated as one of the family, and all the children supposed that
she was a real sister. Yet from early years she developed
instincts unlike those of the children with whom she was
nurtured; she lied, she was cruel, she loved to make mischief,
and she developed precociously vicious sexual impulses; though
carefully educated, she adopted the occupation of her mother, and
at the age of twenty-two was exiled to Siberia for robbery and
attempt to murder. The child of a chance father and a prostitute
mother is not fatally devoted to ruin; but such a child is
ill-bred, and that fact, in some cases, may neutralize all the
influences of good nurture.

When we reach the period of infancy we have already passed beyond the
foundations and potentialities of the sexual life; we are in some cases
witnessing its actual beginnings. It is a well-established fact that
auto-erotic manifestations may sometimes be observed even in infants of
less than twelve months. We are not now called upon to discuss the
disputable point as to how far such manifestations at this age can be
called normal.[18] A slight degree of menstrual and mammary activity
sometimes occurs at birth.[19] It seems clear that nervous and psychic
sexual activity has its first springs at this early period, and as the
years go by an increasing number of individuals join the stream until at
puberty practically all are carried along in the great current.

While, therefore, it is possibly, even probably, true that the soundest
and healthiest individuals show no definite signs of nervous and psychic
sexuality in childhood, such manifestations are still sufficiently
frequent to make it impossible to say that sexual hygiene may be
completely ignored until puberty is approaching.

Precocious physical development occurs as a somewhat rare
variation. W. Roger Williams ("Precocious Sexual Development with
Abstracts of over One Hundred Cases," _British Gynaecological
Journal_, May, 1902) has furnished an important contribution to
the knowledge of this anomaly which is much commoner in girls
than in boys. Roger Williams's cases include only twenty boys to
eighty girls, and precocity is not only more frequent but more
pronounced in girls, who have been known to conceive at eight,
while thirteen is stated to be the earliest age at which boys
have proved able to beget children. This, it may be remarked, is
also the earliest age at which spermatozoa are found in the
seminal fluid of boys; before that age the ejaculations contain
no spermatozoa, and, as Fuerbringer and Moll have found, they may
even be absent at sixteen, or later. In female children
precocious sexual development is less commonly associated with
general increase of bodily development than in boys. (An
individual case of early sexual development in a girl of five has
been completely described and figured in the _Zeitschrift fuer
Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 262.)

Precocious sexual impulses are generally vague, occasional, and
more or less innocent. A case of rare and pronounced character,
in which a child, a boy, from the age of two had been sexually
attracted to girls and women, and directed all his thoughts and
actions to sexual attempts on them, has been described by Herbert
Rich, of Detroit (_Alienist and Neurologist_, Nov., 1905).
General evidence from the literature of the subject as to sexual
precocity, its frequency and significance, has been brought
together by L.M. Terman ("A Study in Precocity," _American
Journal Psychology_, April, 1905).

The erections that are liable to occur in male infants have
usually no sexual significance, though, as Moll remarks, they may
acquire it by attracting the child's attention; they are merely
reflex. It is believed by some, however, and notably by Freud,
that certain manifestations of infant activity, especially
thumb-sucking, are of sexual causation, and that the sexual
impulse constantly manifests itself at a very early age. The
belief that the sexual instinct is absent in childhood, Freud
regards as a serious error, so easy to correct by observation
that he wonders how it can have arisen. "In reality," he remarks,
"the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the world,
sexual sensations accompany it through the days of lactation and
childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual
activities and feelings before the period of puberty" (Freud,
"Zur Sexuellen Aufklaerung der Kinder," _Soziale Medizin und
Hygiene_, Bd. ii, 1907; cf., for details, the same author's _Drei
Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_, 1905). Moll, on the other hand,
considers that Freud's views on sexuality in infancy are
exaggerations which must be decisively rejected, though he admits
that it is difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the
feelings in childhood (Moll, _Das Sexualleben des Kindes_, p.
154). Moll believes also that psycho-sexual manifestations
appearing after the age of eight are not pathological; children
who are weakly or of bad heredity are not seldom sexually
precocious, but, on the other hand, Moll has known children of
eight or nine with strongly developed sexual impulses, who yet
become finely developed men.

Rudimentary sexual activities in childhood, accompanied by sexual
feelings, must indeed--when they are not too pronounced or too
premature--be regarded as coming within the normal sphere, though
when they occur in children of bad heredity they are not without
serious risks. But in healthy children, after the age of seven or
eight, they tend to produce no evil results, and are strictly of
the nature of play. Play, both in animals and men, as Groos has
shown with marvelous wealth of illustration, is a beneficent
process of education; the young creature is thereby preparing
itself for the exercise of those functions which in later life it
must carry out more completely and more seriously. In his _Spiele
der Menschen_, Groos applies this idea to the sexual play of
children, and brings forward quotations from literature in
evidence. Keller, in his "Romeo und Juliet auf dem Dorfe," has
given an admirably truthful picture of these childish
love-relationships. Emil Schultze-Malkowsky (_Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, p. 370) reproduces some scenes from the
life of a little girl of seven clearly illustrating the exact
nature of the sexual manifestation at this age.

A kind of rudimentary sexual intercourse between children, as
Bloch has remarked (_Beitraege_, etc., Bd. ii, p. 254), occurs in
many parts of the world, and is recognized by their elders as
play. This is, for instance, the case among the Bawenda of the
Transvaal (_Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 364),
and among the Papuans of Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, with the approval
of the parents, although much reticence is observed (id., 1889,
Heft 1, p. 16). Godard (_Egypte et Palestine_, 1867, p. 105)
noted the sexual play of the boys and girls in Cairo. In New
Mexico W.A. Hammond (_Sexual Impotence_, p. 107) has seen boys
and girls attempting a playful sexual conjunction with the
encouragement of men and women, and in New York he has seen boys
and girls of three and four doing the same in the presence of
their parents, with only a laughing rebuke. "Playing at pa and
ma" is indeed extremely common among children in genuine
innocence, and with a complete absence of viciousness; and is by
no means confined to children of low social class. Moll remarks
on its frequency (_Libido Sexualis_, Bd. i, p. 277), and the
committee of evangelical pastors, in their investigation of
German rural morality (_Die Geschlechtliche-sittliche
Verhaeltnisse_, Bd. i, p. 102) found that children who are not yet
of school age make attempts at coitus. The sexual play of
children is by no means confined to father and mother games;
frequently there are games of school with the climax in exposure
and smackings, and occasionally there are games of being doctors
and making examinations. Thus a young English woman says: "Of
course, when we were at school [at the age of twelve and earlier]
we used to play with one another, several of us girls; we used to
go into a field and pretend we were doctors and had to examine
one another, and then we used to pull up one another's clothes
and feel each other."

These games do not necessarily involve the cooeperation of the
sexual impulse, and still less have they any element of love. But
emotions of love, scarcely if at all distinguishable from adult
sexual love, frequently appear at equally early ages. They are of
the nature of play, in so far as play is a preparation for the
activities of later life, though, unlike the games, they are not
felt as play. Ramdohr, more than a century ago (_Venus Urania_,
1798), referred to the frequent love of little boys for women.
More usually the love is felt towards individuals of the opposite
or the same sex who are not widely different in age, though
usually older. The most comprehensive study of the matter has
been made by Sanford Bell in America on a basis of as many as
2,300 cases (S. Bell, "A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love
Between the Sexes," _American Journal Psychology_, July, 1902).
Bell finds that the presence of the emotion between three and
eight years of age is shown by such actions as hugging, kissing,
lifting each other, scuffling, sitting close to each other,
confessions to each other and to others, talking about each other
when apart, seeking each other and excluding the rest, grief at
separation, giving gifts, showing special courtesies to each
other, making sacrifices for each other, exhibiting jealousy. The
girls are, on the whole, more aggressive than the boys, and less
anxious to keep the matter secret. After the age of eight, the
girls increase in modesty and the boys become still more
secretive. The physical sensations are not usually located in the
sexual organs; erection of the penis and hyperaemia of the female
sexual parts Bell regards as marking undue precocity. But there
is diffused vascular and nervous tumescence and a state of
exaltation comparable, though not equal, to that experienced in
adolescent and adult age. On the whole, as Bell soundly
concludes, "love between children of opposite sex bears much the
same relation to that between adults as the flower does to the
fruit, and has about as little of physical sexuality in it as an
apple-blossom has of the apple that develops from it." Moll also
(op. cit. p. 76) considers that kissing and other similar
superficial contacts, which he denominates the phenomena of
contrectation, constitute most frequently the first and sole
manifestation of the sexual impulse in childhood.

It is often stated that it is easier for children to preserve
their sexual innocence in the country than in the town, and that
only in cities is sexuality rampant and conspicuous. This is by
no means true, and in some respects it is the reverse of the
truth. Certainly, hard work, a natural and simple life, and a
lack of alert intelligence often combine to keep the rural lad
chaste in thought and act until the period of adolescence is
completed. Ammon, for instance, states, though without giving
definite evidence, that this is common among the Baden
conscripts. Certainly, also, all the multiple sensory excitements
of urban life tend to arouse the nervous and cerebral
excitability of the young at a comparatively early age in the
sexual as in other fields, and promote premature desires and
curiosities. But, on the other hand, urban life offers the young
no gratification for their desires and curiosities. The publicity
of a city, the universal surveillance, the studied decorum of a
population conscious that it is continually exposed to the gaze
of strangers, combine to spread a veil over the esoteric side of
life, which, even when at last it fails to conceal from the young
the urban stimuli of that life, effectually conceals, for the
most part, the gratifications of those stimuli. In the country,
however, these restraints do not exist in any corresponding
degree; animals render the elemental facts of sexual life clear
to all; there is less need or regard for decorum; speech is
plainer; supervision is impossible, and the amplest opportunities
for sexual intimacy are at hand. If the city may perhaps be said
to favor unchastity of thought in the young, the country may
certainly be said to favor unchastity of act.

The elaborate investigations of the Committee of Lutheran pastors
into sexual morality (_Die Geschlechtich-sittliche Verhaeltnisse
im Deutschen Reiche_), published a few years ago, demonstrate
amply the sexual freedom in rural Germany, and Moll, who is
decidedly of opinion that the country enjoys no relative freedom
from sexuality, states (op. cit., pp. 137-139, 239) that even the
circulation of obscene books and pictures among school-children
seems to be more frequent in small towns and the country than in
large cities. In Russia, where it might be thought that urban and
rural conditions offered less contrast than in many countries,
the same difference has been observed. "I do not know," a Russian
correspondent writes, "whether Zola in _La Terre_ correctly
describes the life of French villages. But the ways of a Russian
village, where I passed part of my childhood, fairly resemble
those described by Zola. In the life of the rural population into
which I was plunged everything was impregnated with erotism. One
was surrounded by animal lubricity in all its immodesty. Contrary
to the generally received opinion, I believe that a child may
preserve his sexual innocence more easily in a town than in the
country. There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this rule. But
the functions of the sexual life are generally more concealed in
the towns than in the fields. Modesty (whether or not of the
merely superficial and exterior kind) is more developed among
urban populations. In speaking of sexual things in the towns
people veil their thought more; even the lower class in towns
employ more restraint, more euphemisms, than peasants. Thus in
the towns a child may easily fail to comprehend when risky
subjects are talked of in his presence. It may be said that the
corruption of towns, though more concealed, is all the deeper.
Maybe, but that concealment preserves children from it. The town
child sees prostitutes in the street every day without
distinguishing them from other people. In the country he would
every day hear it stated in the crudest terms that such and such
a girl has been found at night in a barn or a ditch making love
with such and such a youth, or that the servant girl slips every
night into the coachman's bed, the facts of sexual intercourse,
pregnancy, and childbirth being spoken of in the plainest terms.
In towns the child's attention is solicited by a thousand
different objects; in the country, except fieldwork, which fails
to interest him, he hears only of the reproduction of animals and
the erotic exploits of girls and youths. When we say that the
urban environment is more exciting we are thinking of adults, but
the things which excite the adult have usually no erotic effect
on the child, who cannot, however, long remain asexual when he
sees the great peasant girls, as ardent as mares in heat,
abandoning themselves to the arms of robust youths. He cannot
fail to remark these frank manifestations of sexuality, though
the subtle and perverse refinements of the town would escape his
notice. I know that in the countries of exaggerated prudery there
is much hidden corruption, more, one is sometimes inclined to
think, than in less hypocritical countries. But I believe that
that is a false impression, and am persuaded that precisely
because of all these little concealments which excite the
malicious amusement of foreigners, there are really many more
young people in England who remain chaste than in the countries
which treat sexual relations more frankly. At all events, if I
have known Englishmen who were very debauched and very refined in
vice, I have also known young men of the same nation, over
twenty, who were as innocent as children, but never a young
Frenchman, Italian, or Spaniard of whom this could be said."
There is undoubtedly truth in this statement, though it must be
remembered that, excellent as chastity is, if it is based on mere
ignorance, its possessor is exposed to terrible dangers.

The question of sexual hygiene, more especially in its special aspect of
sexual enlightenment, is not, however, dependent on the fact that in some
children the psychic and nervous manifestation of sex appears at an
earlier age than in others. It rests upon the larger general fact that in
all children the activity of intelligence begins to work at a very early
age, and that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive
desire to know many elementary facts of life which are really dependent on
sex. The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know
where children come from. No question could be more natural; the question
of origins is necessarily a fundamental one in childish philosophies as,
in more ultimate shapes, it is in adult philosophies. Most children,
either guided by the statements, usually the misstatements, of their
elders, or by their own intelligence working amid such indications as are
open to them, are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies.

Stanley Hall ("Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1891) has collected some of the
beliefs of young children as to the origin of babies. "God makes
babies in heaven, though the Holy Mother and even Santa Claus
make some. He lets them down and drops them, and the women or
doctors catch them, or He leaves them on the sidewalk, or brings
them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or
mamma or the doctor or the nurse go up and fetch them, sometimes
in a balloon, or they fly down and lose off their wings in some
place or other and forget it, and jump down to Jesus, who gives
them around. They were also often said to be found in
flour-barrels, and the flour sticks ever so long, you know, or
they grew in cabbages, or God puts them in water, perhaps in the
sewer, and the doctor gets them out and takes them to sick folks
that want them, or the milkman brings them early in the morning;
they are dug out of the ground, or bought at the baby store."

In England and America the inquisitive child is often told that
the baby was found in the garden, under a gooseberry bush or
elsewhere; or more commonly it is said, with what is doubtless
felt to be a nearer approach to the truth, that the doctor
brought it. In Germany the common story told to children is that
the stork brings the baby. Various theories, mostly based on
folk-lore, have been put forward to explain this story, but none
of them seem quite convincing (see, e.g., G. Herman,
"Sexual-Mythen," _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, vol. i, Heft 5,
1906, p. 176, and P. Naecke, _Neurologische Centralblatt_, No. 17,
1907). Naecke thinks there is some plausibility in Professor
Petermann's suggestion that a frog writhing in a stork's bill
resembles a tiny human creature.

In Iceland, according to Max Bartels ("Islaendischer Brauch und
Volksglaube," etc., _Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie_, 1900, Heft 2
and 3) we find a transition between the natural and the fanciful
in the stories told to children of the origin of babies (the
stork is here precluded, for it only extends to the southern
border of Scandinavian lands). In North Iceland it is said that
God made the baby and the mother bore it, and on that account is
now ill. In the northwest it is said that God made the baby and
gave it to the mother. Elsewhere it is said that God sent the
baby and the midwife brought it, the mother only being in bed to
be near the baby (which is seldom placed in a cradle). It is also
sometimes said that a lamb or a bird brought the baby. Again it
is said to have entered during the night through the window.
Sometimes, however, the child is told that the baby came out of
the mother's breasts, or from below her breasts, and that is why
she is not well.

Even when children learn that babies come out of the mother's