ore him, or if all
he has heard has been ceaseless reiteration of the pleasures of selfish
indulgence of sex appetite.

Finally, when the boy and the girl come into later adolescence and face
manhood and womanhood, they are ready to know some of the larger social
aspects of sex. They are ready to know of the diseases brought on by
perverted sex habits; of the frightful waste of those who give themselves
to licentiousness, the frightful waste of strength and youthful energy
not only in those that actually go down, but in those that survive. More
than that, seeking right relations of themselves to society, they need to
know the social aspects of sex. The young man needs to know what it means
for a woman to bear a child; he needs to know the social and economic
dependence of the pregnant woman and of the young mother, so that he may
realize what the power of fatherhood means in the actual work of society.
I cannot imagine any man talking glibly of the necessary evil, or of man's
inability to control sex passions, if he knows the social facts of sex.
Any young man who knows even a part of the burden his mother bore for him,
if he has a spark of manhood in his being, is surely fortified against
temptation to selfish indulgence. If, beyond that, he can see the relation
of the home to society, the relative steadiness and dependability of a
worker with a wife and children, who bears the home burdens in a man's
way, as compared with the floating, homeless wanderer who walks our
streets; if he knows these central facts and the dependence of the home
upon the faithfulness of the man and the presence of the man, if he has a
spark of patriotism in his heart, he must realize in his thought and in
his practice the necessity for the socialization of that passion which,
though it begin in individual and selfish forms, issues in such fateful
social consequences.

The solution of this great, urgent, pressing problem, which we are feeling
the weight of more and more in these years of careful investigation of our
social conditions, will come in frankly recognizing the beginnings upon
which the whole sex life in mind and body is based, and in transforming
fundamentally important animal instincts and desires into higher
affections, humanizing them for the sake of the loved one, for the sake of
family, for the sake of the social brotherhood and sisterhood in which we
are members.

My closing word is one which seems to me most significant of