Afterwards I got a reproachful letter from a woman-patrol, who assured me that if anything went wrong, it was not the fault of the girls.  “They are a rough lot,” she wrote, “and, of course, they like to have a soldier to walk out with.  They like to romp with the men, and to kiss them, and perhaps they do go rather far in letting the men pull them about.  But they have no intention whatever of going any further.  If things do go further, it is the men’s fault, not the girls’.”

I could hardly have a better instance of the sort of thing I mean.  The girls want to have “fun” up to a certain point, and there stop.  It does not occur to them that there may be a difference in the point at which they propose—­or wish—­to stop, and that at which the man can.  That there is any physiological or psychological factor in the case which makes stopping possible at one moment and next-door to impossible at another, and that these factors may differ between the sexes, so that one cannot stop just where the other can, is quite a new idea not only to factory girls but to women-patrols—­at least to some of them.  A girl will cheerfully start a man rushing down an inclined plane and then complain because he continues rushing till he reaches the bottom.  Well, in a sense, we ought not to complain of either of them:  we ought to challenge the senseless way in which they are kept in the dark about each other.

In these days, when so much greater liberty is accorded to boys and girls than was given in the past, the friends of liberty should insist with obstinacy on the need for knowledge.  For if liberty is unaccompanied and unguided by knowledge, its degeneration into licence will be triumphantly used by the lovers of bondage as an argument against liberty itself.  Let me then say boldly that I am all for liberty.  I want boys and girls, men and women, to see far more of each other and get to know each other much better than in the past.  I believe in co-education, and in real co-education—­not the sham that is practised in some of our universities and colleges.  I see the risks and I want to take them.  I know there will be “disasters,” and I think them much less disastrous than those attending the methods of obscurantism and restraint.  I think the idea that a boy and girl may not touch each other introduces a silly atmosphere of unreal “romance” where commonplace friendship is what is wanted.  But with all this, and because of all this, I want a girl to know that a boy’s body and mind are not exactly like hers; and perhaps a boy to know that a girl’s is not totally unlike his!