body this knowledge often remains very vague and inaccurate. It
very commonly happens, for instance, in all civilized countries
that the navel is regarded as the baby's point of exit from the
body. This is a natural conclusion, since the navel is seemingly
a channel into the body, and a channel for which there is no
obvious use, while the pudendal cleft would not suggest itself to
girls (and still less to boys) as the gate of birth, since it
already appears to be monopolized by the urinary excretion. This
belief concerning the navel is sometimes preserved through the
whole period of adolescence, especially in girls of the so-called
educated class, who are too well-bred to discuss the matter with
their married friends, and believe indeed that they are already
sufficiently well informed. At this age the belief may not be
altogether harmless, in so far as it leads to the real gate of
sex being left unguarded. In Elsass where girls commonly believe,
and are taught, that babies come through the navel, popular
folk-tales are current (_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 89)
which represent the mistakes resulting from this belief as
leading to the loss of virginity.

Freud, who believes that children give little credit to the stork
fable and similar stories invented for their mystification, has
made an interesting psychological investigation into the real
theories which children themselves, as the result of observation
and thought, reach concerning the sexual facts of life (S. Freud,
"Ueber Infantile Sexualtheorien," _Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908).
Such theories, he remarks, correspond to the brilliant, but
defective hypotheses which primitive peoples arrive at concerning
the nature and origin of the world. There are three theories,
which, as Freud quite truly concludes, are very commonly formed
by children. The first, and the most widely disseminated, is that
there is no real anatomical difference between boys and girls; if
the boy notices that his little sister has no obvious penis he
even concludes that it is because she is too young, and the
little girl herself takes the same view. The fact that in early
life the clitoris is relatively larger and more penis-like helps
to confirm this view which Freud connects with the tendency in
later life to erotic dream of women furnished with a penis. This
theory, as Freud also remarks, favors the growth of homosexuality
when its germs are present. The second theory is the faecal theory
of the origin of babies. The child, who perhaps thinks his mother
has a penis, and is in any case ignorant of the vagina, concludes
that the baby is brought into the world by an action analogous to
the action of the bowels. The third theory, which is perhaps less
prevalent than the others, Freud terms the sadistic theory of
coitus. The child realizes that his father must have taken some
sort of part in his production. The theory that sexual
intercourse consists in violence has in it a trace of truth, but
seems to be arrived at rather obscurely. The child's own sexual
feelings are often aroused for the first time when wrestling or
struggling with a companion; he may see his mother, also,
resisting more or less playfully a sudden caress from his father,
and if a real quarrel takes place, the impression may be
fortified. As to what the state of marriage consists in, Freud
finds that it is usually regarded as a state which abolishes
modesty; the most prevalent theory being that marriage means that
people can make water before each other, while another common
childish theory is that marriage is when people can show each
other their private parts.

Thus it is that at a very early stage of the child's life we are brought
face to face with the question how we may most wisely begin his initiation
into the knowledge of the great central facts of sex. It is perhaps a
little late in the day to regard it as a question, but so it is among us,
although three thousand five hundred years ago, the Egyptian father spoke
to his child: "I have given you a mother who has carried you within her, a
heavy burden, for your sake, and without resting on me. When at last you
were born, she indeed submitted herself to the yoke, for during three
years were her nipples in your mouth. Your excrements never turned her
stomach, nor made her say, 'What am I doing?' When you were sent to school
she went regularly every day to carry the household bread and beer to your
master. When in your turn you marry and have a child, bring up your child
as your mother brought you up."[20]

I take it for granted, however, that--whatever doubt there may be as to
the how or the when--no doubt is any longer possible as to the absolute
necessity of taking deliberate and active part in this sexual initiation,
instead of leaving it to the chance revelation of ignorant and perhaps
vicious companions or servants. It is becoming more and more widely felt
that the risks of ignorant innocence are too great.

"All the love and solicitude parental yearning can bestow,"
writes Dr. G.F. Butler, of Chicago (_Love and its Affinities_,
1899, p. 83), "all that the most refined religious influence can
offer, all that the most cultivated associations can accomplish,
in one fatal moment may be obliterated. There is no room for
ethical reasoning, indeed oftentimes no consciousness of wrong,
but only Margaret's 'Es war so suess'." The same writer adds (as
had been previously remarked by Mrs. Craik and others) that among
church members it is the finer and more sensitive organizations
that are the most susceptible to sexual emotions. So far as boys
are concerned, we leave instruction in matters of sex, the most
sacred and central fact in the world, as Canon Lyttelton remarks,
to "dirty-minded school-boys, grooms, garden-boys, anyone, in
short, who at an early age may be sufficiently defiled and
sufficiently reckless to talk of them." And, so far as girls are
concerned, as Balzac long ago remarked, "a mother may bring up
her daughter severely, and cover her beneath her wings for
seventeen years; but a servant-girl can destroy that long work by
a word, even by a gesture."

The great part played by servant-girls of the lower class in the
sexual initiation of the children of the middle class has been
illustrated in dealing with "The Sexual Impulse in Women" in vol.
iii, of these _Studies_, and need not now be further discussed.
I would only here say a word, in passing, on the other side.
Often as servant-girls take this part, we must not go so far as
to say that it is the case with the majority. As regards Germany,
Dr. Alfred Kind has lately put on record his experience: "I have
_never_, in youth, heard a bad or improper word on
sex-relationships from a servant-girl, although servant-girls
followed one another in our house like sunshine and showers in
April, and there was always a relation of comradeship between us
children and the servants." As regards England, I can add that my
own youthful experiences correspond to Dr. Kind's. This is not
surprising, for one may say that in the ordinary well-conditioned
girl, though her virtue may not be developed to heroic
proportions, there is yet usually a natural respect for the
innocence of children, a natural sexual indifference to them, and
a natural expectation that the male should take the active part
when a sexual situation arises.

It is also beginning to be felt that, especially as regards women,
ignorant innocence is not merely too fragile a possession to be worth
preservation, but that it is positively mischievous, since it involves the
lack of necessary knowledge. "It is little short of criminal," writes Dr.
F.M. Goodchild,[21] "to send our young people into the midst of the
excitements and temptations of a great city with no more preparation than
if they were going to live in Paradise." In the case of women, ignorance
has the further disadvantage that it deprives them of the knowledge
necessary for intelligent sympathy with other women. The unsympathetic
attitude of women towards women is often largely due to sheer ignorance of
the facts of life. "Why," writes in a private letter a married lady who
keenly realizes this, "are women brought up with such a profound ignorance
of their own and especially other women's natures? They do not know half
as much about other women as a man of the most average capacity learns in
his day's march." We try to make up for our failure to educate women in
the essential matters of sex by imposing upon the police and other
guardians of public order the duty of protecting women and morals. But, as
Moll insists, the real problem of chastity lies, not in the multiplication
of laws and policemen, but largely in women's knowledge of the dangers of
sex and in the cultivation of their sense of responsibility.[22] We are
always making laws for the protection of children and setting the police
on guard. But laws and the police, whether their activities are good or
bad, are in either case alike ineffectual. They can for the most part only
be invoked when the damage is already done. We have to learn to go to the
root of the matter. We have to teach children to be a law to themselves.
We have to give them that knowledge which will enable them to guard their
own personalities.[23] There is an authentic story of a lady who had
learned to swim, much to the horror of her clergyman, who thought that
swimming was unfeminine. "But," she said, "suppose I was drowning." "In
that case," he replied, "you ought to wait until a man comes along and
saves you." There we have the two methods of salvation which have been
preached to women, the old method and the new. In no sea have women been
more often in danger of drowning than that of sex. There ought to be no
question as to which is the better method of salvation.

It is difficult nowadays to find any serious arguments against
the desirability of early sexual enlightenment, and it is almost
with amusement that we read how the novelist Alphonse Daudet,
when asked his opinion of such enlightenment, protested--in a
spirit certainly common among the men of his time--that it was
unnecessary, because boys could learn everything from the streets
and the newspapers, while "as to young girls--no! I would teach
them none of the truths of physiology. I can only see
disadvantages in such a proceeding. These truths are ugly,
disillusioning, sure to shock, to frighten, to disgust the mind,
the nature, of a girl." It is as much as to say that there is no
need to supply sources of pure water when there are puddles in
the street that anyone can drink of. A contemporary of Daudet's,
who possessed a far finer spiritual insight, Coventry Patmore,
the poet, in the essay on "Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity" in
his beautiful book, _Religio Poetae_, had already finely protested
against that "disease of impurity" which comes of "our modern
undivine silences" for which Daudet pleaded. And Metchnikoff,
more recently, from the scientific side, speaking especially as
regards women, declares that knowledge is so indispensable for
moral conduct that "ignorance must be counted the most immoral of
acts" (_Essais Optimistes_, p. 420).

The distinguished Belgian novelist, Camille Lemonnier, in his
_L'Homme en Amour_, deals with the question of the sexual
education of the young by presenting the history of a young man,
brought up under the influence of the conventional and
hypocritical views which teach that nudity and sex are shameful
and disgusting things. In this way he passes by the opportunities
of innocent and natural love, to become hopelessly enslaved at
last to a sensual woman who treats him merely as the instrument
of her pleasure, the last of a long succession of lovers. The
book is a powerful plea for a sane, wholesome, and natural
education in matters of sex. It was, however, prosecuted at
Bruges, in 1901, though the trial finally ended in acquittal.
Such a verdict is in harmony with the general tendency of feeling
at the present time.

The old ideas, expressed by Daudet, that the facts of sex are
ugly and disillusioning, and that they shock the mind of the
young, are both alike entirely false. As Canon Lyttelton remarks,
in urging that the laws of the transmission of life should be
taught to children by the mother: "The way they receive it with
native reverence, truthfulness of understanding and guileless
delicacy, is nothing short of a revelation of the never-ceasing
beauty of nature. People sometimes speak of the indescribable
beauty of children's innocence. But I venture to say that no one
quite knows what it is who has foregone the privilege of being
the first to set before them the true meaning of life and birth
and the mystery of their own being. Not only do we fail to build
up sound knowledge in them, but we put away from ourselves the
chance of learning something that must be divine." In the same
way, Edward Carpenter, stating that it is easy and natural for
the child to learn from the first its physical relation to its
mother, remarks (_Love's Coming of Age_, p. 9): "A child at the
age of puberty, with the unfolding of its far-down emotional and
sexual nature, is eminently capable of the most sensitive,
affectional and serene appreciation of what _sex_ means
(generally more so as things are to-day, than its worldling
parent or guardian); and can absorb the teaching, if
sympathetically given, without any shock or disturbance to its
sense of shame--that sense which is so natural and valuable a
safeguard of early youth."

How widespread, even some years ago, had become the conviction
that the sexual facts of life should be taught to girls as well
as boys, was shown when the opinions of a very miscellaneous
assortment of more or less prominent persons were sought on the
question ("The Tree of Knowledge," _New Review_, June, 1894). A
small minority of two only (Rabbi Adler and Mrs. Lynn Lynton)
were against such knowledge, while among the majority in favor of
it were Mme. Adam, Thomas Hardy, Sir Walter Besant, Bjoernson,
Hall Caine, Sarah Grand, Nordau, Lady Henry Somerset, Baroness
von Suttner, and Miss Willard. The leaders of the woman's
movement are, of course, in favor of such knowledge. Thus a
meeting of the Bund fuer Mutterschutz at Berlin, in 1905, almost
unanimously passed a resolution declaring that the early sexual
enlightenment of children in the facts of the sexual life is
urgently necessary (_Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 2, p. 91). It may
be added that medical opinion has long approved of this
enlightenment. Thus in England it was editorially stated in the
_British Medical Journal_ some years ago (June 9, 1894): "Most
medical men of an age to beget confidence in such affairs will be
able to recall instances in which an ignorance, which would have
been ludicrous if it had not been so sad, has been displayed on
matters regarding which every woman entering on married life
ought to have been accurately informed. There can, we think, be
little doubt that much unhappiness and a great deal of illness
would be prevented if young people of both sexes possessed a
little accurate knowledge regarding the sexual relations, and
were well impressed with the profound importance of selecting
healthy mates. Knowledge need not necessarily be nasty, but even
if it were, it certainly is not comparable in that respect with
the imaginings of ignorance." In America, also, where at an
annual meeting of the American Medical Association, Dr. Denslow
Lewis, of Chicago, eloquently urged the need of teaching sexual
hygiene to youths and girls, all the subsequent nine speakers,
some of them physicians of worldwide fame, expressed their
essential agreement (_Medico-Legal Journal_, June-Sept., 1903).
Howard, again, at the end of his elaborate _History of
Matrimonial Institutions_ (vol. iii, p. 257) asserts the
necessity for education in matters of sex, as going to the root
of the marriage problem. "In the future educational programme,"
he remarks, "sex questions must hold an honorable place."

While, however, it is now widely recognized that children are entitled to
sexual enlightenment, it cannot be said that this belief is widely put
into practice. Many persons, who are fully persuaded that children should
sooner or later be enlightened concerning the sexual sources of life, are
somewhat nervously anxious as to the precise age at which this
enlightenment should begin. Their latent feeling seems to be that sex is
an evil, and enlightenment concerning sex also an evil, however necessary,
and that the chief point is to ascertain the latest moment to which we can
safely postpone this necessary evil. Such an attitude is, however,
altogether wrong-headed. The child's desire for knowledge concerning the
origin of himself is a perfectly natural, honest, and harmless desire, so
long as it is not perverted by being thwarted. A child of four may ask
questions on this matter, simply and spontaneously. As soon as the
questions are put, certainly as soon as they become at all insistent, they
should be answered, in the same simple and spontaneous spirit, truthfully,
though according to the measure of the child's intelligence and his
capacity and desire for knowledge. This period should not, and, if these
indications are followed, naturally would not, in any case, be delayed
beyond the sixth year. After that age even the most carefully guarded
child is liable to contaminating communications from outside. Moll points
out that the sexual enlightenment of girls in its various stages ought to
be always a little ahead of that of boys, and as the development of girls
up to the pubertal age is more precocious than that of boys, this demand
is reasonable.

If the elements of sexual education are to be imparted in early childhood,
it is quite clear who ought to be the teacher. There should be no question
that this privilege belongs by every right to the mother. Except where a
child is artificially separated from his chief parent it is indeed only
the mother who has any natural opportunity of receiving and responding to
these questions. It is unnecessary for her to take any initiative in the
matter. The inevitable awakening of the child's intelligence and the
evolution of his boundless curiosity furnish her love and skill with all
opportunities for guiding her child's thoughts and knowledge. Nor is it
necessary for her to possess the slightest technical information at this
stage. It is only essential that she should have the most absolute faith
in the purity and dignity of her physical relationship to her child, and
be able to speak of it with frankness and tenderness. When that essential
condition is fulfilled every mother has all the knowledge that her young
child needs.

Among the best authorities, both men and women, in all the
countries where this matter is attracting attention, there seems
now to be unanimity of opinion in favor of the elementary facts
of the baby's relationship to its mother being explained to the
child by the mother as soon as the child begins to ask questions.
Thus in Germany Moll has repeatedly argued in this sense; he
insists that sexual enlightenment should be mainly a private and
individual matter; that in schools there should be no general and
personal warnings about masturbation, etc. (though at a later age
he approves of instruction in regard to venereal diseases), but
that the mother is the proper person to impart intimate knowledge
to the child, and that any age is suitable for the commencement
of such enlightenment, provided it is put into a form fitted for
the age (Moll, op. cit., p. 264).

At the Mannheim meeting of the Congress of the German Society for
Combating Venereal Disease, when the question of sexual
enlightenment formed the sole subject of discussion, the opinion
in favor of early teaching by the mother prevailed. "It is the
mother who must, in the first place, be made responsible for the
child's clear understanding of sexual things, so often lacking,"
said Frau Krukenberg ("Die Aufgabe der Mutter,"
_Sexualpaedagogik_, p. 13), while Max Enderlin, a teacher, said on
the same occasion ("Die Sexuelle Frage in die Volksschule," id.,
p. 35): "It is the mother who has to give the child his first
explanations, for it is to his mother that he first naturally
comes with his questions." In England, Canon Lyttelton, who is
distinguished among the heads of public schools not least by his
clear and admirable statements on these questions, states
(_Mothers and Sons_, p. 99) that the mother's part in the sexual
enlightenment and sexual guardianship of her son is of paramount
importance, and should begin at the earliest years. J.H. Badley,
another schoolmaster ("The Sex Difficulty," _Broad Views_, June,
1904), also states that the mother's part comes first. Northcote
(_Christianity and Sex Problems_, p. 25) believes that the duty
of the parents is primary in this matter, the family doctor and
the schoolmaster coming in at a later stage. In America, Dr. Mary
Wood Allen, who occupies a prominent and influential position in
women's social movements, urges (in _Child-Confidence Rewarded_,
and other pamphlets) that a mother should begin to tell her child
these things as soon as he begins to ask questions, the age of
four not being too young, and explains how this may be done,
giving examples of its happy results in promoting a sweet
confidence between the child and his mother.

If, as a few believe should be the case, the first initiation is delayed
to the tenth year or even later, there is the difficulty that it is no
longer so easy to talk simply and naturally about such things; the mother
is beginning to feel too shy to speak for the first time about these
difficult subjects to a son or a daughter who is nearly as big as herself.
She feels that she can only do it awkwardly and ineffectively, and she
probably decides not to do it at all. Thus an atmosphere of mystery is
created with all the embarrassing and perverting influences which mystery
encourages.

There can be no doubt that, more especially in highly intelligent
children with vague and unspecialized yet insistent sexual
impulses, the artificial mystery with which sex is too often
clothed not only accentuates the natural curiosity but also tends
to favor the morbid intensity and even prurience of the sexual
impulse. This has long been recognized. Dr. Beddoes wrote at the
beginning of the nineteenth century: "It is in vain that we
dissemble to ourselves the eagerness with which children of
either sex seek to satisfy themselves concerning the conformation
of the other. No degree of reserve in the heads of families, no
contrivances, no care to put books of one description out of
sight and to garble others, has perhaps, with any one set of
children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of
curiosity. No part of the history of human thought would perhaps
be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in
different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of
the secret. And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can
but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames" (T.
Beddoes, _Hygeia_, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59). Kaan, again, in one of
the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one
of the causes of _psychopathia sexualis_. Marro (_La Puberta_, p.
299) points out how the veil of mystery thrown over sexual
matters merely serves to concentrate attention on them. The
distinguished Dutch writer Multatuli, in one of his letters
(quoted with approval by Freud), remarks on the dangers of hiding
things from boys and girls in a veil of mystery, pointing out
that this must only heighten the curiosity of children, and so
far from keeping them pure, which mere ignorance can never do,
heats and perverts their imaginations. Mrs. Mary Wood Allen,
also, warns the mother (op. cit., p. 5) against the danger of
allowing any air of embarrassing mystery to creep over these
things. "If the instructor feels any embarrassment in answering
the queries of the child, he is not fitted to be the teacher, for
the feeling of embarrassment will, in some subtle way,
communicate itself to the child, and he will experience an
indefinable sense of offended delicacy which is both unnecessary
and undesirable. Purification of one's own thought is, then, the
first step towards teaching the truth purely. Why," she adds, "is
death, the gateway out of life, any more dignified or pathetic
than birth, the gateway into life? Or why is the taking of
earthly life a more awful fact than the giving of life?" Mrs.
Ennis Richmond, in a book of advice to mothers which contains
many wise and true things, says: "I want to insist, more strongly
than upon anything else, that it is the _secrecy_ that surrounds
certain parts of the body and their functions that gives them
their danger in the child's thought. Little children, from
earliest years, are taught to think of these parts of their body
as mysterious, and not only so, but that they are mysterious
because they are unclean. Children have not even a name for them.
If you have to speak to your child, you allude to them
mysteriously and in a half-whisper as 'that little part of you
that you don't speak of,' or words to that effect. Before
everything it is important that your child should have a good
working name for these parts of his body, and for their
functions, and that he should be taught to use and to hear the
names, and that as naturally and openly as though he or you were
speaking of his head or his foot. Convention has, for various
reasons, made it impossible to speak in this way in public. But
you can, at any rate, break through this in the nursery. There
this rule of convention has no advantage, and many a serious
disadvantage. It is easy to say to a child, the first time he
makes an 'awkward' remark in public: 'Look here, laddie, you may
say what you like to me or to daddy, but, for some reason or
other, one does not talk about these' (only say _what_ things)
'in public.' Only let your child make the remark in public
_before_ you speak (never mind the shock to your caller's
feelings), don't warn him against doing so" (Ennis Richmond,
_Boyhood_, p. 60). Sex must always be a mystery, but, as Mrs.
Richmond rightly says, "the real and true mysteries of generation
and birth are very different from the vulgar secretiveness with
which custom surrounds them."

The question as to the precise names to be given to the more
private bodily parts and functions is sometimes a little
difficult to solve. Every mother will naturally follow her own
instincts, and probably her own traditions, in this matter. I
have elsewhere pointed out (in the study of "The Evolution of
Modesty") how widespread and instinctive is the tendency to adopt
constantly new euphemisms in this field. The ancient and simple
words, which in England a great poet like Chaucer could still use
rightly and naturally, are so often dropped in the mud by the
vulgar that there is an instinctive hesitation nowadays in
applying them to beautiful uses. They are, however,
unquestionably the best, and, in their origin, the most dignified
and expressive words. Many persons are of opinion that on this
account they should be rescued from the mud, and their sacredness
taught to children. A medical friend writes that he always taught
his son that the vulgar sex names are really beautiful words of
ancient origin, and that when we understand them aright we cannot
possibly see in them any motive for low jesting. They are simple,
serious and solemn words, connoting the most central facts of
life, and only to ignorant and plebeian vulgarity can they cause
obscene mirth. An American man of science, who has privately and
anonymously printed some pamphlets on sex questions, also takes
this view, and consistently and methodically uses the ancient
and simple words. I am of opinion that this is the ideal to be
sought, but that there are obvious difficulties at present in the
way of attaining it. In any case, however, the mother should be
in possession of a very precise vocabulary for all the bodily
parts and acts which it concerns her children to know.

It is sometimes said that at this early age children should not be told,
even in a simple and elementary form, the real facts of their origin but
should, instead, hear a fairy-tale having in it perhaps some kind of
symbolic truth. This contention may be absolutely rejected, without
thereby, in any degree, denying the important place which fairy-tales hold
in the imagination of young children. Fairy-tales have a real value to the
child; they are a mental food he needs, if he is not to be spiritually
starved; to deprive him of fairy-tales at this age is to do him a wrong
which can never be made up at any subsequent age. But not only are sex
matters too vital even in childhood to be safely made matter for a
fairy-tale, but the real facts are themselves as wonderful as any
fairy-tale, and appeal to the child's imagination with as much force as a
fairy-tale.

Even, however, if there were no other reasons against telling children
fairy-tales of sex instead of the real facts, there is one reason which
ought to be decisive with every mother who values her influence over her
child. He will very quickly discover, either by information from others or
by his own natural intelligence, that the fairy-tale, that was told him in
reply to a question about a simple matter of fact, was a lie. With that
discovery his mother's influence over him in all such matters vanishes for
ever, for not only has a child a horror of being duped, but he is
extremely sensitive about any rebuff of this kind, and never repeats what
he has been made to feel was a mistake to be ashamed of. He will not
trouble his mother with any more questions on this matter; he will not
confide in her; he will himself learn the art of telling "fairy-tales"
about sex matters. He had turned to his mother in trust; she had not
responded with equal trust, and she must suffer the punishment, as
Henriette Fuerth puts it, of seeing "the love and trust of her son stolen
from her by the first boy he makes friends with in the street." When, as
sometimes happens (Moll mentions a case), a mother goes on repeating these
silly stories to a girl or boy of seven who is secretly well-informed, she
only degrades herself in her child's eyes. It is this fatal mistake, so
often made by mothers, which at first leads them to imagine that their
children are so innocent, and in later years causes them many hours of
bitterness because they realize they do not possess their children's
trust. In the matter of trust it is for the mother to take the first step;
the children who do not trust their mothers are, for the most part, merely
remembering the lesson they learned at their mother's knee.

The number of little books and pamphlets dealing with the
question of the sexual enlightenment of the young--whether
intended to be read by the young or offering guidance to mothers
and teachers in the task of imparting knowledge--has become very
large indeed during recent years in America, England, and
especially Germany, where there has been of late an enormous
production of such literature. The late Ben Elmy, writing under
the pseudonym of "Ellis Ethelmer," published two booklets, _Baby
Buds_, and _The Human Flower_ (issued by Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy,
Buxton House, Congleton), which state the facts in a simple and
delicate manner, though the author was not a notably reliable
guide on the scientific aspects of these questions. A charming
conversation between a mother and child, from a French source, is
reprinted by Edward Carpenter at the end of his _Love's Coming of
Age. How We Are Born_, by Mrs. N.J. (apparently a Russian lady
writing in English), prefaced by J.H. Badley, is satisfactory.
Mention may also be made of _The Wonder of Life_, by Mary Tudor
Pole. Margaret Morley's _Song of Life_, an American book, which I
have not seen, has been highly praised. Most of these books are
intended for quite young children, and while they explain more or
less clearly the origin of babies, nearly always starting with
the facts of plant life, they touch very slightly, if at all, on
the relations of the sexes.

Mrs. Ennis Richmond's books, largely addressed to mothers, deal
with these questions in a very sane, direct, and admirable
manner, and Canon Lyttelton's books, discussing such questions
generally, are also excellent. Most of the books now to be
mentioned are intended to be read by boys and girls who have
reached the age of puberty. They refer more or less precisely to
sexual relationships, and they usually touch on masturbation.
_The Story of Life_, written by a very accomplished woman, the
late Ellice Hopkins, is somewhat vague, and introduces too many
exalted religious ideas. Arthur Trewby's _Healthy Boyhood_ is a
little book of wholesome tendency; it deals specially with
masturbation. _A Talk with Boys About Themselves_ and _A Talk
with Girls About Themselves_, both by Edward Bruce Kirk (the
latter book written in conjunction with a lady) deal with general
as well as sexual hygiene. There could be no better book to put
into the hands of a boy or girl at puberty than M.A. Warren's
_Almost Fourteen_, written by an American school teacher in 1892.
It was a most charming and delicately written book, which could
not have offended the innocence of the most sensitive maiden.
Nothing, however, is sacred to prurience, and it was easy for the
prurient to capture the law and obtain (in 1897) legal
condemnation of this book as "obscene." Anything which sexually
excites a prurient mind is, it is true, "obscene" for that mind,
for, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder remarks, obscenity is "the
contribution of the reading mind," but we need such books as this
in order to diminish the number of prurient minds, and the
condemnation of so entirely admirable a book makes, not for
morality, but for immorality. I am told that the book was
subsequently issued anew with most of its best portions omitted,
and it is stated by Schroeder (_Liberty of Speech and Press
Essential to Purity Propaganda_, p. 34) that the author was
compelled to resign his position as a public school principal.
Maria Lischnewska's _Geschlechtliche Belehrung der Kinder_
(reprinted from _Mutterschutz_, 1905, Heft 4 and 5) is a most
admirable and thorough discussion of the whole question of sexual
education, though the writer is more interested in the teacher's
share in this question than in the mother's. Suggestions to
mothers are contained in Hugo Salus, _Wo kommen die Kinder her?_,
E. Stiehl, _Eine Mutterpflicht_, and many other books. Dr. Alfred
Kind strongly recommends Ludwig Gurlitt's _Der Verkehr mit meinem
Kindern_, more especially in its combination of sexual education
with artistic education. Many similar books are referred to by
Bloch, in his _Sexual Life of Our Time_, Ch. xxvi.

I have enumerated the names of these little books because they
are frequently issued in a semi-private manner, and are seldom
easy to procure or to hear of. The propagation of such books
seems to be felt to be almost a disgraceful action, only to be
performed by stealth. And such a feeling seems not unnatural when
we see, as in the case of the author of _Almost Fourteen_, that a
nominally civilized country, instead of loading with honors a man
who has worked for its moral and physical welfare, seeks so far
as it can to ruin him.

I may add that while it would usually be very helpful to a mother
to be acquainted with a few of the booklets I have named, she
would do well, in actually talking to her children, to rely
mainly on her own knowledge and inspiration.

The sexual education which it is the mother's duty and privilege to
initiate during her child's early years cannot and ought not to be
technical. It is not of the nature of formal instruction but is a private
and intimate initiation. No doubt the mother must herself be taught.[24]
But the education she needs is mainly an education in love and insight.
The actual facts which she requires to use at this early stage are very
simple. Her main task is to make clear the child's own intimate relations
to herself and to show that all young things have a similar intimate
relation to their mothers; in generalizing on this point the egg is the
simplest and most fundamental type to explain the origin of the individual
life, for the idea of the egg--in its widest sense as the seed--not only
has its truth for the human creature but may be applied throughout the
animal and vegetable world. In this explanation the child's physical
relationship to his father is not necessarily at first involved; it may be
left to a further stage or until the child's questions lead up to it.

Apart from his interest in his origin, the child is also interested in his
sexual, or as they seem to him exclusively, his excretory organs, and in
those of other people, his sisters and parents. On these points, at this
age, his mother may simply and naturally satisfy his simple and natural
curiosity, calling things by precise names, whether the names used are
common or uncommon being a matter in regard to which she may exercise her
judgment and taste. In this manner the mother will, indirectly, be able to
safeguard her child at the outset against the prudish and prurient notions
alike which he will encounter later. She will also without unnatural
stress be able to lead the child into a reverential attitude towards his
own organs and so exert an influence against any undesirable tampering
with them. In talking with him about the origin of life and about his own
body and functions, in however elementary a fashion, she will have
initiated him both in sexual knowledge and in sexual hygiene.

The mother who establishes a relationship of confidence with her child
during these first years will probably, if she possesses any measure of
wisdom and tact, be able to preserve it even after the epoch of puberty
into the difficult years of adolescence. But as an educator in the
narrower sense her functions will, in most cases, end at or before
puberty. A somewhat more technical and completely impersonal acquaintance
with the essential facts of sex then becomes desirable, and this would
usually be supplied by the school.

The great though capricious educator, Basedow, to some extent a
pupil of Rousseau, was an early pioneer in both the theory and
the practice of giving school children instruction in the facts
of the sexual life, from the age of ten onwards. He insists much
on this subject in his great treatise, the _Elementarwerk_
(1770-1774). The questions of children are to be answered
truthfully, he states, and they must be taught never to jest at
anything so sacred and serious as the sexual relations. They are
to be shown pictures of childbirth, and the dangers of sexual
irregularities are to be clearly expounded to them at the outset.
Boys are to be taken to hospitals to see the results of venereal
disease. Basedow is aware that many parents and teachers will be
shocked at his insistence on these things in his books and in his
practical pedagogic work, but such people, he declares, ought to
be shocked at the Bible (see, e.g., Pinloche, _La Reforme de
l'Education en Allemagne au dixhuitieme siecle: Basedow et le
Philanthropinisme_, pp. 125, 256, 260, 272). Basedow was too far
ahead of his own time, and even of ours, to exert much influence
in this matter, and he had few immediate imitators.

Somewhat later than Basedow, a distinguished English physician,
Thomas Beddoes, worked on somewhat the same lines, seeking to
promote sexual knowledge by lectures and demonstrations. In his
remarkable book, _Hygeia_, published in 1802 (vol. i, Essay IV)
he sets forth the absurdity of the conventional requirement that
"discretion and ignorance should lodge in the same bosom," and
deals at length with the question of masturbation and the need of
sexual education. He insists on the great importance of lectures
on natural history which, he had found, could be given with
perfect propriety to a mixed audience. His experiences had shown
that botany, the amphibia, the hen and her eggs, human anatomy,
even disease and sometimes the sight of it, are salutary from
this point of view. He thinks it is a happy thing for a child to
gain his first knowledge of sexual difference from anatomical
subjects, the dignity of death being a noble prelude to the
knowledge of sex and depriving it forever of morbid prurience.
It is scarcely necessary to remark that this method of teaching
children the elements of sexual anatomy in the _post-mortem_ room
has not found many advocates or followers; it is undesirable, for
it fails to take into account the sensitiveness of children to
such impressions, and it is unnecessary, for it is just as easy
to teach the dignity of life as the dignity of death.

The duty of the school to impart education in matters of sex to
children has in recent years been vigorously and ably advocated
by Maria Lischnewska (op. cit.), who speaks with thirty years'
experience as a teacher and an intimate acquaintance with
children and their home life. She argues that among the mass of
the population to-day, while in the home-life there is every
opportunity for coarse familiarity with sexual matters, there is
no opportunity for a pure and enlightened introduction to them,
parents being for the most part both morally and intellectually
incapable of aiding their children here. That the school should
assume the leading part in this task is, she believes, in
accordance with the whole tendency of modern civilized life. She
would have the instruction graduated in such a manner that during
the fifth or sixth year of school life the pupil would receive
instruction, with the aid of diagrams, concerning the sexual
organs and functions of the higher mammals, the bull and cow
being selected by preference. The facts of gestation would of
course be included. When this stage was reached it would be easy
to pass on to the human species with the statement: "Just in the
same way as the calf develops in the cow so the child develops in
the mother's body."

It is difficult not to recognize the force of Maria Lischnewska's
argument, and it seems highly probable that, as she asserts, the
instruction proposed lies in the course of our present path of
progress. Such instruction would be formal, unemotional, and
impersonal; it would be given not as specific instruction in
matters of sex, but simply as a part of natural history. It would
supplement, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, the
information the child had already received from its mother. But
it would by no means supplant or replace the personal and
intimate relationship of confidence between mother and child.
That is always to be aimed at, and though it may not be possible
among the ill-educated masses of to-day, nothing else will
adequately take its place.

There can be no doubt, however, that while in the future the school will
most probably be regarded as the proper place in which to teach the
elements of physiology--and not as at present a merely emasculated and
effeminated physiology--the introduction of such reformed teaching is as
yet impracticable in many communities. A coarse and ill-bred community
moves in a vicious circle. Its members are brought up to believe that sex
matters are filthy, and when they become adults they protest violently
against their children being taught this filthy knowledge. The teacher's
task is thus rendered at the best difficult, and under democratic
conditions impossible. We cannot, therefore, hope for any immediate
introduction of sexual physiology into schools, even in the unobtrusive
form in which alone it could properly be introduced, that is to say as a
natural and inevitable part of general physiology.

This objection to animal physiology by no means applies, however, to
botany. There can be little doubt that botany is of all the natural
sciences that which best admits of this incidental instruction in the
fundamental facts of sex, when we are concerned with children below the
age of puberty. There are at least two reasons why this should be so. In
the first place botany really presents the beginnings of sex, in their
most naked and essential forms; it makes clear the nature, origin, and
significance of sex. In the second place, in dealing with plants the facts
of sex can be stated to children of either sex or any age quite plainly
and nakedly without any reserve, for no one nowadays regards the botanical
facts of sex as in any way offensive. The expounder of sex in plants also
has on his side the advantage of being able to assert, without question,
the entire beauty of the sexual process. He is not confronted by the
ignorance, bad education, and false associations which have made it so
difficult either to see or to show the beauty of sex in animals. From the
sex-life of plants to the sex-life of the lower animals there is, however,
but a step which the teacher, according to his discretion, may take.

An early educational authority, Salzmann, in 1785 advocated the
sexual enlightenment of children by first teaching them botany,
to be followed by zooelogy. In modern times the method of
imparting sex knowledge to children by means, in the first place,
of botany, has been generally advocated, and from the most
various quarters. Thus Marro (_La Puberta_, p. 300) recommends
this plan. J. Hudrey-Menos ("La Question du Sexe dans
l'Education," _Revue Socialiste_, June, 1895), gives the same
advice. Rudolf Sommer, in a paper entitled "Maedchenerziehung oder
Menschenbildung?" (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Jahrgang I,
Heft 3) recommends that the first introduction of sex knowledge
to children should be made by talking to them on simple natural
history subjects; "there are endless opportunities," he remarks,
"over a fairy-tale, or a walk, or a fruit, or an egg, the sowing
of seed or the nest-building of birds." Canon Lyttelton
(_Training of the Young in Laws of Sex_, pp. 74 et seq.) advises
a somewhat similar method, though laying chief stress on personal
confidence between the child and his mother; "reference is made
to the animal world just so far as the child's knowledge extends,
so as to prevent the new facts from being viewed in isolation,
but the main emphasis is laid on his feeling for his mother and
the instinct which exists in nearly all children of reverence due
to the maternal relation;" he adds that, however difficult the
subject may seem, the essential facts of paternity must also be
explained to boys and girls alike. Keyes, again (_New York
Medical Journal_, Feb. 10, 1906), advocates teaching children
from an early age the sexual facts of plant life and also
concerning insects and other lower animals, and so gradually
leading up to human beings, the matter being thus robbed of its
unwholesome mystery. Mrs. Ennis Richmond (_Boyhood_, p. 62)
recommends that children should be sent to spend some of their
time upon a farm, so that they may not only become acquainted
with the general facts of the natural world, but also with the
sexual lives of animals, learning things which it is difficult to