No one who studies psychology to-day can fail to realize how unconscious people often are of the seat and the nature of their own troubles.  It is true that the tendency to exaggerate the importance of sex seems likely to vitiate to some extent the conclusions of psychologists like Freud and his disciples.  But that they have revealed to us a mass of hitherto unknown and un-understood suffering in the minds of both women and men, arising from the continual repression of a passion whose strength may be measured by the disastrous consequences caused by repressing it, no one who knows anything at all of modern psychology can deny.  Those who do not understand their own trouble will often deny that the trouble exists, and deny it quite honestly.  But those who have become the physicians of the mind are just beginning to learn how tremendous a sacrifice the world has asked of women in the past while denying that it was a sacrifice at all!

Now, this repression follows, in many women and in a considerable number of men, on the assumption that there is something in sex too shameful to be spoken about or looked at in the light.  We set out, I repeat, on our campaign without a map of the country and with our compasses pointing the wrong way.  And this, above all, is true when repression has caused some actual perversion in the mind, some arrested development, some abnormal condition.  This is not always the consequence of deliberate repression on the part of the individual, but it is, I believe, often the consequence of an artificial state of civilization; an attitude towards a great and wonderful impulse which has perverted our whole view of what is divine and lovely in human nature.  Whatever the cause, the result is abnormality of some kind, and to people who have suffered so, I want, above all, to say this:  light and understanding are needed more by you, perhaps, than by anyone else, and to you, above all, they have been denied.  Loneliness, isolation, the loss of self-respect, the darkness of ignorance have surrounded those to whom the sacrifice has been hardest, and, therefore, the repression, whether racial or individual, most disastrous.  You can, if you choose, leave the world a nobler place because you let light in on these dark places.  Do not say to yourselves that your suffering is useless and purposeless because it is no good to anyone:  no one knows of it:  no one understands it:  and, therefore, it has all the additional bitterness of being to no purpose.  That need not be true.  Ignorance need not continue.  If you will try to make your suffering of service to the world, it is not difficult to measure how great may be our advance in fundamental morality in this present generation.