“All the love and solicitude parental yearning can bestow,” writes Dr. G.F.  Butler, of Chicago (Love and its Affinities, 1899, p. 83), “all that the most refined religious influence can offer, all that the most cultivated associations can accomplish, in one fatal moment may be obliterated.  There is no room for ethical reasoning, indeed oftentimes no consciousness of wrong, but only Margaret’s ’Es war so suess’.”  The same writer adds (as had been previously remarked by Mrs. Craik and others) that among church members it is the finer and more sensitive organizations that are the most susceptible to sexual emotions.  So far as boys are concerned, we leave instruction in matters of sex, the most sacred and central fact in the world, as Canon Lyttelton remarks, to “dirty-minded school-boys, grooms, garden-boys, anyone, in short, who at an early age may be sufficiently defiled and sufficiently reckless to talk of them.”  And, so far as girls are concerned, as Balzac long ago remarked, “a mother may bring up her daughter severely, and cover her beneath her wings for seventeen years; but a servant-girl can destroy that long work by a word, even by a gesture.”

The great part played by servant-girls of the lower class in the sexual initiation of the children of the middle class has been illustrated in dealing with “The Sexual Impulse in Women” in vol. iii, of these Studies, and need not now be further discussed.  I would only here say a word, in passing, on the other side.  Often as servant-girls take this part, we must not go so far as to say that it is the case with the majority.  As regards Germany, Dr. Alfred Kind has lately put on record his experience:  “I have never, in youth, heard a bad or improper word on sex-relationships from a servant-girl, although servant-girls followed one another in our house like sunshine and showers in April, and there was always a relation of comradeship between us children and the servants.”  As regards England, I can add that my own youthful experiences correspond to Dr. Kind’s.  This is not surprising, for one may say that in the ordinary well-conditioned girl, though her virtue may not be developed to heroic proportions, there is yet usually a natural respect for the innocence of children, a natural sexual indifference to them, and a natural expectation that the male should take the active part when a sexual situation arises.

It is also beginning to be felt that, especially as regards women, ignorant innocence is not merely too fragile a possession to be worth preservation, but that it is positively mischievous, since it involves the lack of necessary knowledge.  “It is little short of criminal,” writes Dr. F.M.  Goodchild,[21] “to send our young people into the midst of the excitements and temptations of a great city with no more preparation than if they were going to live in Paradise.”  In the case of women, ignorance has the further disadvantage that