suitable to be
placed in the hands of older people. It might only give them pain. It is
in youth that the questions of mature age can alone be settled, if they
ever are to be settled, and unless we begin to think about adult problems
when we are young all our thinking is likely to be in vain. There are but
few people who are able when youth is over either on the one hand to
re-mould themselves nearer to those facts of Nature and of Society they
failed to perceive, or had not the courage to accept, when they were
young, or, on the other hand, to mould the facts of the exterior world
nearer to those of their own true interior world. One hesitates to bring
home to them too keenly what they have missed in life. Yet, let us
remember, even for those who have missed most, there always remains the
fortifying and consoling thought that they may at least help to make the
world better for those who come after them, and the possibilities of human
adjustment easier for others than it has been for themselves. They must
still remain true to their own traditions. We could not wish it to be
otherwise.

The art of making love and the art of being virtuous;--two aspects of the
great art of living that are, rightly regarded, harmonious and not at
variance--remain, indeed, when we cease to misunderstand them, essentially
the same in all ages and among all peoples. Yet, always and everywhere,
little modifications become necessary, little, yet, like so many little
things, immense in their significance and results. In this way, if we are
really alive, we flexibly adjust ourselves to the world in which we find
ourselves, and in so doing simultaneously adjust to ourselves that
ever-changing world, ever-changing, though its changes are within such
narrow limits that it yet remains substantially the same. It is with such
modification that we are concerned in these Little Essays.

H.E.

_London, 1921_

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Children and Parents 13
II The Meaning of Purity 37
III The Objects of Marriage 63
IV Husbands and Wives 75
V The Love-Rights of Women 102
VI The Play-Function of Sex 116
VII The Individual and the Race 134
Index 183

LITTLE ESSAYS OF LOVE AND VIRTUE

CHAPTER I

CHILDREN AND PARENTS

The twentieth century, as we