we human at all.

The special risk run by those who would deal with these matters
seriously--or rather one of the risks--is that they will be suspected,
and may indeed be guilty, of a tendency to priggishness and cant. Youth
is very likely not far wrong in suspecting those who would discuss these
matters, for youth has too often been told that they are of the earth
earthy, that these are the low parts of our nature which we must learn
to despise and trample on, and youth knows in its heart that whatever
else may or may not be cant, this certainly is. So any one who proposes
to speak gravely on the subject is a suspect.

Meetings confined to persons of one sex offer excellent opportunities.
Much can be done, if the suspicion of cant be avoided, by men addressing
the meetings of men only which gather in many churches on Sunday
afternoons, and which have a healthy interest in the life of this world
and of this world to come, as well as in matters less immediate. It
seems to me that women doctors ought to be able to do excellent work in
addressing meetings of girls and women, provided always that the speaker
be genuinely a woman, rightly aware of the supremacy of motherhood.

Most of us know that it is possible to read a medical work on sex, say
in French, without any offence to the aesthetic sense, though a
translation into one's native tongue is scarcely tolerable. This
contrasted influence of different names for the same thing is another of
those problems in the psychology of prudery which I do not undertake to
analyze, but which must be recognized by the practical enemy of prudery.
It is unquestionably possible to address a mixed audience, large or
small, of any social status, on these matters without offence and to
good purpose. But certain terms must be avoided and synonyms used
instead. There are at least three special cases, the recognition of
which may make the practical difference between shocking an audience and
producing the effect one desires.

Reproduction is a good word from every point of view, but its
associations are purely physiological, and it is better to employ a word
which renders the use of the other superfluous and which has a special
virtue of its own. This is the term parenthood, a hybrid no doubt, but
not perhaps much the worse for that. One may notice a teacher of
zoology, say, accustomed to address medical students, offend an audience
by the use of the word reproduction, where parenthood wou