advertisement appeared once
more, and this time the offender was arrested. The gentleman thereupon
wrote to the Public Prosecutor, blaming him for not having taken action
on the first occasion. The Public Prosecutor regarded this as libellous,
and actually brought an action for libel against the philanthropic
gentleman. Happily the Public Prosecutor lost his case; but none the
less, in view of what happened, a good citizen may well hesitate in
future to take similar action in the public interest, if, for some
trifling excess of zeal, he is to render himself liable to an action for
libel.

As I said above, of late years, in Berlin at any rate, such
advertisements appear less often; or those that do appear belong chiefly
to the second group. Doubtless we owe this to the action of the
authorities, and more especially to a paragraph of the _Lex
Heinze_,[126] of whose existence but few persons are aware, and of
which, as my own note-books show, certain sexual perverts have only
become aware to their sorrow through a legal prosecution. I refer to the
paragraph by which the issue of advertisements for an immoral purpose is
declared to be a punishable offence. The newspapers have now become
cautious about the insertion of advertisements whose immoral purpose is
plainly perceptible. Moreover, the perverts themselves who used to issue
such advertisements, having through the activity of the authorities
learned the significance of the paragraph in question, no longer
advertise in unmistakable terms.

CHAPTER IX

SEXUAL EDUCATION

In view of the dangers to which children are exposed from the side of
the sexual life, the question presses whether and how it is possible to
prevent these dangers arising, or, if prevention has failed, to minimise
them. To enable us to answer this question, the general question of
sexual education will have to be considered. In so far as sexual
manifestations in the child may arise from hereditary taint, the
sociologist will endeavour to prevent them by hindering marriage or
procreation on the part of those likely to give birth to such children
(eugenics). Our present knowledge, however, does not enable us to say,
when an individual exhibits some particular tendency to sexual
aberration, whether this same tendency will appear as a concrete symptom
in the descendants. Apart, indeed, from certain cases of very severe
taint, we are hardly in a position even to predict with any high degree
of pr