and disastrously so,
here also. Prudery here insists that boys and girls shall be left to
learn anyhow. That is not what it says, but that is what it does. It
feebly supposes not merely that ignorance and innocence are identical,
but that, failing the parent, the doctor, the teacher, and the
clergyman--and probably all these do fail--ignorance will remain
ignorant. There are others, however, who always lie in wait, whether by
word of mouth or the printed word, and since youth will in any case
learn--except in the case of a few rare and pure souls--we have to ask
ourselves whether we prefer that these matters shall be associated in
its mind with the cad round the corner or the groom or the chauffeur who
instructs the boy, the domestic servant who instructs the girl, and with
all those notions of guilty secrecy and of misplaced levity which are
entailed; or with the idea that it is right and wise to understand
these matters in due measure because their concerns are the greatest in
human life.

After puberty, and during early adolescence, when a certain amount of
knowledge has been acquired, we leave youth free to learn lies from
advertisements, carefully calculated to foster the tendency to
hypochondria, which is often associated with such matters. Of this,
however, no more need now be said, since it scarcely concerns the girl.

It is the ignorance conditioned by prudery that is responsible later on
for many criminal marriages; contracted, it may be, with the blind
blessing of Church and State, which, however, the laws of heredity and
infection rudely ignore. Parents cannot bring themselves to inquire into
matters which profoundly concern the welfare of the daughter for whom
they propose to make what appears to be a good marriage. They desire, of
course, that her children shall be healthy and whole-minded; they do not
desire that marriage should be for her the beginning of disease, from
the disastrous effects of which she may never recover. But these are
delicate matters, and prudery forbids that they should be inquired into;
yet every father who permits his daughter to marry without having
satisfied himself on these points is guilty, at the least, of grave
delinquency of duty, and may, in effect, be conniving at disasters and
desolations of which he will not live to see the end.

Young people often grow fond of each other and become engaged, and then,
if the engagement be prolonged--as all engagements ought to be, as