could make it for the men to keep straight, if they were ignorant
or foolish themselves. I knew--and said so--that the girls were in a
difficult position too; but, after all, they prided themselves on being the
more "moral" (_i.e._ the stronger) sex, and should be chivalrous.

Afterwards I got a reproachful letter from a woman-patrol, who assured me
that if anything went wrong, it was not the fault of the girls. "They are a
rough lot," she wrote, "and, of course, they like to have a soldier to walk
out with. They like to romp with the men, and to kiss them, and perhaps
they do go rather far in letting the men pull them about. But they have no
intention whatever of going any further. If things do go further, it is the
men's fault, not the girls'."

I could hardly have a better instance of the sort of thing I mean. The
girls want to have "fun" up to a certain point, and there stop. It does
not occur to them that there may be a difference in the point at which they
propose--or wish--to stop, and that at which the man can. That there is
any physiological or psychological factor in the case which makes stopping
possible at one moment and next-door to impossible at another, and that
these factors may differ between the sexes, so that one cannot stop just
where the other can, is quite a new idea not only to factory girls but to
women-patrols--at least to some of them. A girl will cheerfully start a
man rushing down an inclined plane and then complain because he continues
rushing till he reaches the bottom. Well, in a sense, we ought not to
complain of either of them: we ought to challenge the senseless way in
which they are kept in the dark about each other.

In these days, when so much greater liberty is accorded to boys and girls
than was given in the past, the friends of liberty should insist with
obstinacy on the need for knowledge. For if liberty is unaccompanied and
unguided by knowledge, its degeneration into licence will be triumphantly
used by the lovers of bondage as an argument against liberty itself. Let me
then say boldly that I am all for liberty. I want boys and girls, men and
women, to see far more of each other and get to know each other much
better than in the past. I believe in co-education, and in _real_
co-education--not the sham that is practised in some of our universities
and colleges. I see the risks and I want to take them. I know there will be
"disasters," and I think them much less disastrous than