by the experience of the confessional, are enabled to speak with authority.  An old Bavarian priest thus writes (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, 1907, Bd. ii, Heft I):  “At Moral Congresses we hear laudation of ‘the good old times’ when, faith and morality prevailed among the people.  Whether that is correct is another question.  As a young priest I heard of as many and as serious sins as I now hear of as an old man.  The morality of the people is not greater nor is it less.  The error is the belief that immorality goes out of the towns and poisons the country.  People talk as though the country were a pure Paradise of innocence.  I will by no means call our country people immoral, but from an experience of many years I can say that in sexual respects there is no difference between town and country.  I have learnt to know more than a hundred different parishes, and in the most various localities, in the mountain and in the plain, on poor land and on rich land.  But everywhere I find the same morals and lack of morals.  There are everywhere the same men, though in the country there are often better Christians than in the towns.”

If, however, we go much farther back than the memories of a living man it seems highly probable that the sexual customs of the German people of the present day are not substantially different—­though it may well be that at different periods different circumstances have accentuated them—­from what they were in the dawn of Teutonic history.  This is the opinion of one of the profoundest students of Indo-Germanic origins.  In his Reallexicon (art.  “Keuschheit”) O. Schrader points out that the oft-quoted Tacitus, strictly considered, can only be taken to prove that women were chaste after marriage, and that no prostitution existed.  There can be no doubt, he adds, and the earliest historical evidence shows, that women in ancient Germany were not chaste before marriage.  This fact has been disguised by the tendency of the old classic writers to idealize the Northern peoples.

Thus we have to realize that the conception of “German virtue,” which has been rendered so familiar to the world by a long succession of German writers, by no means involves any special devotion to the virtue of chastity.  Tacitus, indeed, in the passage more often quoted in Germany than any other passage in classic literature, while correctly emphasizing the late puberty of the Germans and their brutal punishment of conjugal infidelity on the part of the wife, seemed to imply that they were also chaste.  But we have always to remark that Tacitus wrote as a satirizing moralist as well as a historian, and that, as he declaimed concerning the virtues of the German barbarians, he had one eye on the Roman gallery whose vices he desired to lash.  Much the same perplexing confusion has been created by Gildas, who, in describing the results of the Saxon Conquest of Britain, wrote as a preacher as well as a historian, and the