intercourse with a girl who is over the age of sixteen.  It is better, from the legal point of view, to cast the net less widely and to be quite sure that it is adapted to catch the real and conscious offender, who may be punished without offending the common sense of the community.  (Cf.  Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time, Ch.  XXIV; he considers that the “age of consent” should begin with the completion of the sixteenth year.)

It may be necessary to add that the establishment of the “age of consent” on this basis by no means implies that intercourse with girls but little over sixteen should be encouraged, or even socially and morally tolerated.  Here, however, we are not in the sphere of law.  It is the natural tendency of the well-born and well-nurtured girl under civilized conditions to hold herself in reserve, and the pressure whereby that tendency is maintained and furthered must be supplied by the whole of her environment, primarily by the intelligent reflection of the girl herself when she has reached the age of adolescence.  To foster in a young woman who has long passed the epoch of puberty the notion that she has no responsibility in the guardianship of her own body and soul is out of harmony with modern feeling, as well as unfavorable to the training of women for the world.  The States which have been induced to adopt the high limit of the age of consent have, indeed, thereby made an abject confession of their inability to maintain a decent moral level by more legitimate means; they may profitably serve as a warning rather than as an example.

The knowledge of women cannot, however, replace, the ignorance of men, but, on the contrary, merely serves to reveal it.  For in the art of love the man must necessarily take the initiative.  It is he who must first unseal the mystery of the intimacies and audacities which the woman’s heart may hold.  The risk of meeting with even the shadow of contempt or disgust is too serious to allow a woman, even a wife, to reveal the secrets of love to a man who has not shown himself to be an initiate.[387] Numberless are the jovial and contented husbands who have never suspected, and will never know, that their wives carry about with them, sometimes with silent resentment, the ache of mysterious tabus.  The feeling that there are delicious privacies and privileges which she has never been asked to take, or forced to accept, often erotically divorces a wife from a husband who never realizes what he has missed.[388] The case of such husbands is all the harder because, for the most part, all that they have done is the result of the morality that has been preached to them.  They have been taught from boyhood to be strenuous and manly and clean-minded, to seek by all means to put out of their minds the thought of women or the longing for sensuous indulgence.  They have been told on all sides that only in marriage is it right or even safe to approach women.  They have acquired the