sium would
become a school of morality, in which young growing things would
be able to retain their purity as long as possible through
becoming naturally accustomed to each other. At the same time
their bodies would be hardened and developed, and the perception
of beautiful and natural forms awakened." To those who have any
"moral" doubts on the matter, he mentions the custom in remote
country districts of boys and girls bathing together quite naked
and without any sexual consciousness. Rudolf Sommer, similarly,
in an excellent article entitled "Maedchenerziehung oder
Menschenbildung?" (_Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. i, Heft 3)
advises that children should be made accustomed to each other's
nakedness from an early age in the family life of the house or
the garden, in games, and especially in bathing; he remarks that
parents having children of only one sex should cultivate for
their children's sake intimate relations with a family having
children of like age of the opposite sex, so that they may grow
up together.

It is scarcely necessary to add that the cultivation of nakedness must
always be conciliated with respect for the natural instincts of modesty.
If the practice of nakedness led the young to experience a diminished
reverence for their own or others' personalities the advantages of it
would be too dearly bought. This is, in part, a matter of wholesome
instinct, in part of wise training. We now know that the absence of
clothes has little relation with the absence of modesty, such relation as
there is being of the inverse order, for the savage races which go naked
are usually more modest than those which wear clothes. The saying quoted
by Herodotus in the early Greek world that "A woman takes off her modesty
with her shift" was a favorite text of the Christian Fathers. But
Plutarch, who was also a moralist, had already protested against it at the
close of the Greek world: "By no means," he declared, "she who is modest
clothes herself with modesty when she lays aside her tunic." "A woman may
be naked," as Mrs. Bishop, the traveller, remarked to Dr. Baelz, in Japan,
"and yet behave like a lady."[42]

The question is complicated among ourselves because established
traditions of rigid concealment have fostered a pruriency which is an
offensive insult to naked modesty. In many lands the women who are
accustomed to be almost or quite naked in the p