nous effects on family life and national health, are before us.
The old policy must therefore be wrong. Let us try with all our might
the reform, however disgusting its first appearance may be. This
surely is the virile argument of men who know what they are aiming at.
And yet it is based on fundamental psychological misapprehensions. It
is a great confusion of causes and effects. The misery has this
distressing form not on account of the policy of silence, but in spite
of it, or rather it took the tremendous dimensions of to-day at the
same time that the dam of silence was broken and the flood of sexual
gossip rushed in.

We find exactly this relation throughout the history of civilized
mankind. To be sure, some editorial writers behave as if the erotic
calamity of the day were something unheard of, and as if it demanded a
new remedy. The historical retrospect leaves no doubt that periods of
sexual tension and of sexual relaxation, of hysteric erotic excitement
and of a certain cool indifference have alternated throughout
thousands of years. And whenever an age was unusually immoral and
lascivious, it was always also a period in which under the mask of
scientific interest or social frankness or aesthetic openmindedness the
sexual problems were matters of freest discussion. The periods of
austerity and restraint, on the other hand, were always characterized
also by an unwillingness to talk about sexual relations and to show
them in their animal nakedness. Antiquity knew those ups and downs,
mediaeval times knew them, and in modern centuries the fluctuations
have been still more rapid. As soon as a moral age with its policy of
silence is succeeded by an immoral age, it is certainly a very easy
historical misconstruction to say that the immorality resulted from
the preceding conspiracy of silence and that the immorality would
disappear if the opposite scheme of frankest speech were adopted. But
the fact that this argument is accepted and that the overwhelming
majority hails the new regime with enthusiasm is nothing but an
almost essential part of the new period, which has succeeded the time
of modesty.

Sexual discussion and sexual immorality have always been parts of one
circle; sexual silence and moral restraint form another circle. The
change from one to the other has come in the history of mankind,
usually through new conditions of life, and the primary factor has not
been any policy of keeping quiet in respect or o