young people in England who remain chaste than in the countries
which treat sexual relations more frankly. At all events, if I
have known Englishmen who were very debauched and very refined in
vice, I have also known young men of the same nation, over
twenty, who were as innocent as children, but never a young
Frenchman, Italian, or Spaniard of whom this could be said."
There is undoubtedly truth in this statement, though it must be
remembered that, excellent as chastity is, if it is based on mere
ignorance, its possessor is exposed to terrible dangers.

The question of sexual hygiene, more especially in its special aspect of
sexual enlightenment, is not, however, dependent on the fact that in some
children the psychic and nervous manifestation of sex appears at an
earlier age than in others. It rests upon the larger general fact that in
all children the activity of intelligence begins to work at a very early
age, and that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive
desire to know many elementary facts of life which are really dependent on
sex. The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know
where children come from. No question could be more natural; the question
of origins is necessarily a fundamental one in childish philosophies as,
in more ultimate shapes, it is in adult philosophies. Most children,
either guided by the statements, usually the misstatements, of their
elders, or by their own intelligence working amid such indications as are
open to them, are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies.

Stanley Hall ("Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School,"
_Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1891) has collected some of the
beliefs of young children as to the origin of babies. "God makes
babies in heaven, though the Holy Mother and even Santa Claus
make some. He lets them down and drops them, and the women or
doctors catch them, or He leaves them on the sidewalk, or brings
them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or
mamma or the doctor or the nurse go up and fetch them, sometimes
in a balloon, or they fly down and lose off their wings in some
place or other and forget it, and jump down to Jesus, who gives
them around. They were also often said to be found in
flour-barrels, and the flour sticks ever so long, you know, or
they grew in cabbages, or God puts them in water, per