us as right. I think
it is a particularly intolerable state of affairs. It is not pleasant to
find oneself out as a moral hypocrite.

The primitive savage within us all always will make any kind of excuse
to break out in its own primitive savage way. We are just too civilized
to face this, and, I think, there can be little doubt that our conduct
has been hindered by many of the modern intellectual suppressions. The
convention that passions and emotions are absent, when in reality they
are present, to-day has broken down as, indeed, it always must break
down everywhere, leading in thousands of cases individual young women
and men to disaster, making us all more furtive, more pitiful slaves of
the force whose power we are not yet sufficiently brave to acknowledge.

Much of our civilization has revealed itself as a monstrous sham, more
dangerously indecent because of its pretense at decency. It is something
like those poisoned tropical forests, fever-infested, which were in the
land of my birth, beautiful outwardly, with great vivid flowers, high
palms, towering trees of fern, all garlanded with creepers and lovely
wild growth,--glades of fair shadow inviting to rest, yet poisonous so
that to sleep there was death.

II

We have yet to find our way in sexual things. The revealing knowledge
that Freud and his followers have given to the world shows us something
of our groping darkness; there is much we have to relearn, to accept
many things in ourselves and others that we have denied. We must give
up our cherished pretense of the sexual life being easy and innocent, we
must open doors into the secret defenses we have set around ourselves.
None of us know much, but at least we must begin to tell the truth about
the little we do know.

Now, this self-honesty may sound a simple thing. It is not. Few of us
even know how hard it will be. It will call for the greatest possible
courage to tear away the new, as well as the old, bandages with which we
have blinkered our eyes, walking in shadow so complete that some of us
have lost the very power of sight, like the strange fishes that live in
the gloom of the Kentucky caves. Honesty will demand a real conversion,
a change in our attitude to ourselves and to one another. We shall have,
indeed, to reassure ourselves of the sincerity of our intentions, to
begin as the first necessary step to accept ourselves as we are and to
give up what we desire to pretend we are, to learn to b