ldren's Bureau in Washington combine
with our modern knowledge of heredity to show that it is possible to cut
down the potential heritage of children by bad matrimonial choices. If
we are to reach a solution of these population problems, we must learn
to approach the problem of the sex relation without that sense of
uncleanness which has led so many generations to regard marriage as
giving respectability to an otherwise wicked inclination. The task of
devising a sane approach is only just begun. But the menace of
prostitution and of the social diseases has become so great that society
is compelled from an instinct of sheer self-preservation to drag into
the open some of the iniquities which have hitherto existed under cover.

In the first place, the education of girls, which has been almost
entirely determined by the standardized concepts of the ideal woman, has
left them totally unprepared for wifehood and motherhood, the very
calling which those ideals demand that they shall follow. The whole
education of the girl aims at the concealment of the physiological
nature of men and women. She enters marriage unprepared for the
realities of conjugal life, and hence incapable of understanding either
herself or her husband. When pregnancy comes to such a wife, the old
seclusion taboos fall upon her like a categorical imperative. She is
overwhelmed with embarrassment at a normal and natural biological
process which can hardly be classified as "romantic." Such an attitude
is neither conducive to the eugenic choice of a male nor to the proper
care of the child either before or after its birth.

A second dysgenic influence which results from the taboo system of
sexual ethics is the institution of prostitution, the great agency for
the spread of venereal disease through the homes of the community, and
which takes such heavy toll from the next generation in lowered vitality
and defective organization.

The 1911 report of the Committee on the Social Evil in Baltimore showed
that at the time there was in that city one prostitute to every 500
inhabitants. As is the case everywhere, such statistics cover only
prostitutes who have been detected. Hospital and clinic reports for
Baltimore gave 9,450 acute cases of venereal disease in 1906 as compared
with 575 cases of measles, 1,172 cases of diphtheria, 577 of scarlet
fever, 175 of chickenpox, 58 of smallpox and 733 cases of tuberculosis.

Statistics on the health of young men shown by