little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period. Yet at no time—especially in women, who present all the various stages of the sexual life in so emphatic a form—would education be more valuable. The great burden of reproduction, with all its absorbing responsibilities, has suddenly been lifted; at the same time the perpetually recurring rhythm of physical sex manifestations, so often disturbing in its effect, finally ceases; with that cessation, very often, after a brief period of perturbation, there is an increase both in physical and mental energy. Yet, too often, all that one can see is that a vacuum has been created, and that there is nothing to fill it. The result is that the mother—for it is most often of the mother that complaint is made—devotes her own new found energies to the never-ending task of hampering and crushing her children's developing energies. How many mothers there are who bring to our minds that ancient and almost inspired statement concerning those for whom "Satan finds some mischief still"! They are wasting, worse than wasting, energies that might be profitably applied to all sorts of social service in the world. There is nothing that is so much needed as the "maternal in politics," or in all sorts of non-political channels of social service, and none can be better fitted for such service than those who have had an actual experience of motherhood and acquired the varied knowledge that such experience should give. There are numberless other ways, besides social service, in which mothers who have passed the age of forty, providing they possess the necessary aptitudes, can more profitably apply themselves than in hampering, or pampering, their adult children. It is by wisely cultivating their activities in a larger sphere that women whose chief duties in the narrower domestic sphere are over may better ensure their own happiness and the welfare of others than either by fretting and obstructing, or by worrying over, their own children who are no longer children. It is quite true that the children may go astray even when they have ceased to be children. But the time to implant the seeds of virtue, the time to convey a knowledge of life, was when they were small. If it was done well, it only remains to exercise faith and trust. If it was done ill, nothing done later will compensate, for it is merely foolish for a mother who could not educate her children when they were small to imagine that she is able to educate them when they are big.

So it is that the problem of the attitude of the child to its parents circles round again to that of the parents to the child. The wise parent realises that childhood is simply a preparation for the free activities of later life, that the parents exist in order to equip children for life and not to shelter and protect them from the world into which they must be cast. Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life. Beyond that, and no doubt in the largest part, it is a natural growth and takes place of itself.

CHAPTER II

THE MEANING OF PURITY

I

We live in a world in which, as we nowadays begin to realise, we find two antagonistic streams of traditional platitude concerning the question of sexual purity, both flowing from the far past.

The people who embody one of these streams of tradition, basing themselves on old-fashioned physiology, assume, though they may not always assert, that the sexual products are excretions, to be dealt with summarily like other excretions. That is an ancient view and it was accepted by such wise philosophers of old times as Montaigne and Sir Thomas More. It had, moreover, the hearty support of so eminent a theological authority as Luther, who on this ground preached early marriage to men and women alike. It is still a popular view, sometimes expressed in the crudest terms, and often by people who, not following Luther's example, use it to defend prostitution, though they generally exclude women from its operation, as a sex to whom it fails to apply and by whom it is not required.

But on the other hand we have another stream of platitude. On this side there is usually little attempt either to deny or to affirm the theory of the opposing party, though they would contradict its conclusions. Their theory, if they have one, would usually seem to be that sexual activity is a response to stimulation from without or from within, so that if there is no stimulation there will be no sexual manifestation. They would preach, they tell us, a strenuous ideal; they would set up a wholesome dictate of hygiene. The formula put forward on this basis usually runs: Continence is not only harmless but beneficial. It is a formula which, in one form or another, has received apparently enthusiastic approval in many quarters, even from distinguished physicians. We need not be surprised. A proposition so large and general is not easy to deny, and is still more difficult to reverse; therefore it proves welcome to the people—especially the people occupying public and professional positions—who wish to find the path of least resistance, under pressure of a vigorous section of public opinion. Yet in its vagueness the proposition is a little disingenuous; it condescends to no definitions and no qualifications; it fails even to make clear how it is to be reconciled with any enthusiastic approval of marriage, for if continence is beautiful how can marriage make it cease to be so?

Both these streams of feeling, it may be noted, sprang from a common source far back in the primitive human world. All the emanations of the human body, all the spontaneous manifestations of its activities, were mysterious and ominous to early man, pregnant with terror unless met with immense precautions and surrounded by careful ritual. The manifestations of sex were the least intelligible and the most spontaneous. Therefore the things of sex were those that most lent themselves to feelings of horror and awe, of impurity and of purity. They seemed so highly charged with magic potency that there were no things that men more sought to avoid, yet none to which they were impelled to give more thought. The manifold echoes of that primitive conception of sex, and all the violent reactions that were thus evolved and eventually bound up with the original impulse, compose the streams of tradition that feed our modern world in this matter and determine the ideas of purity that surround us.

At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified. We begin to find the grounds for a sounder theory. Not indeed that the problems of sex, which go so deeply into the whole personal and social life, can ever be settled exclusively upon physiological grounds. But we have done much to prepare even the loftiest Building of Love when we have attained a clear view of its biological basis.

The progress of chemico-physiological research during recent years has now brought us to new ground for our building. Indeed the image might well be changed altogether, and it might be said that science has entirely transferred the drama of reproduction to a new stage with new actors. Therewith the immense emphasis placed on excretion, and the inevitable reaction that emphasis aroused, both alike disappear. The sexual protagonists are no longer at the surface but within the most secret recesses of the organism, and they appear to science under the name of Hormones or Internal Secretions, always at work within and never themselves condescending to appear at all. Those products of the sexual glands which in both sexes are cast out of the body, and at an immature stage of