it deprives them of the knowledge necessary for intelligent sympathy with other women.  The unsympathetic attitude of women towards women is often largely due to sheer ignorance of the facts of life.  “Why,” writes in a private letter a married lady who keenly realizes this, “are women brought up with such a profound ignorance of their own and especially other women’s natures?  They do not know half as much about other women as a man of the most average capacity learns in his day’s march.”  We try to make up for our failure to educate women in the essential matters of sex by imposing upon the police and other guardians of public order the duty of protecting women and morals.  But, as Moll insists, the real problem of chastity lies, not in the multiplication of laws and policemen, but largely in women’s knowledge of the dangers of sex and in the cultivation of their sense of responsibility.[22] We are always making laws for the protection of children and setting the police on guard.  But laws and the police, whether their activities are good or bad, are in either case alike ineffectual.  They can for the most part only be invoked when the damage is already done.  We have to learn to go to the root of the matter.  We have to teach children to be a law to themselves.  We have to give them that knowledge which will enable them to guard their own personalities.[23] There is an authentic story of a lady who had learned to swim, much to the horror of her clergyman, who thought that swimming was unfeminine.  “But,” she said, “suppose I was drowning.”  “In that case,” he replied, “you ought to wait until a man comes along and saves you.”  There we have the two methods of salvation which have been preached to women, the old method and the new.  In no sea have women been more often in danger of drowning than that of sex.  There ought to be no question as to which is the better method of salvation.

It is difficult nowadays to find any serious arguments against the desirability of early sexual enlightenment, and it is almost with amusement that we read how the novelist Alphonse Daudet, when asked his opinion of such enlightenment, protested—­in a spirit certainly common among the men of his time—­that it was unnecessary, because boys could learn everything from the streets and the newspapers, while “as to young girls—­no!  I would teach them none of the truths of physiology.  I can only see disadvantages in such a proceeding.  These truths are ugly, disillusioning, sure to shock, to frighten, to disgust the mind, the nature, of a girl.”  It is as much as to say that there is no need to supply sources of pure water when there are puddles in the street that anyone can drink of.  A contemporary of Daudet’s, who possessed a far finer spiritual insight, Coventry Patmore, the poet, in the essay on “Ancient and Modern Ideas of Purity” in his beautiful book, Religio Poetae, had already finely protested against that “disease of impurity” which comes of “our modern undivine silences”