y that during the past ten years more has been done to influence
popular feeling on this question than during the whole of the preceding
century.

Whenever we witness a sudden impulse of zeal and enthusiasm to rush into
a new channel, however admirable the impulse may be, we must be prepared
for many risks and perhaps even a certain amount of damage. This is,
indeed, especially the case when we are concerned with a new activity in
the sphere of sex. The sexual relationships of life are so ancient and
so wide, their roots ramify so complexly and run so deep, that any
sudden disturbance in this soil, however well-intentioned, is certain to
have many results which were not anticipated by those responsible for
it. Any movement here runs the risk of defeating its own ends, or else,
in gaining them, to render impossible other ends which are of not less
value.

In this matter of sexual hygiene we are faced at the outset by the fact
that the very recognition of any such branch of knowledge as "sexual
hygiene" involves not merely a new departure, but the reversal of a
policy which has been accepted, almost without question, for centuries.
Among many primitive peoples, indeed, we know that the boy and girl at
puberty are initiated with solemnity, and even a not unwholesome
hardship, into the responsibilities of adult life, including those which
have reference to the duties and privileges of sex.[184] But in our own
traditions scarcely even a relic of any such custom is preserved. On the
contrary, we tacitly maintain a custom, and even a policy, of silent
obscurantism. Parents and teachers have considered it a duty to say
nothing and have felt justified in telling lies, or "fairy tales," in
order to maintain their attitude. The oncoming of puberty, with its
alarming manifestations, especially in the girl, has often left them
unmoved and still silent. They have taken care that our elementary
textbooks of anatomy and physiology, even when written by so independent
and fearless a pioneer as Huxley, should describe the human body
absolutely as though the organs and functions of reproduction had no
existence. The instinct was not thus suppressed; all the inevitable
stimulations which life furnishes to the youthful sexual impulse have
continued in operation.[185] Sexual activities were just as liable to
break out. They were all the more liable to break out, indeed, because
fostered by ignorance, often unconscious of themselves, and not