harmless desire, so long as it is not perverted by being thwarted.  A child of four may ask questions on this matter, simply and spontaneously.  As soon as the questions are put, certainly as soon as they become at all insistent, they should be answered, in the same simple and spontaneous spirit, truthfully, though according to the measure of the child’s intelligence and his capacity and desire for knowledge.  This period should not, and, if these indications are followed, naturally would not, in any case, be delayed beyond the sixth year.  After that age even the most carefully guarded child is liable to contaminating communications from outside.  Moll points out that the sexual enlightenment of girls in its various stages ought to be always a little ahead of that of boys, and as the development of girls up to the pubertal age is more precocious than that of boys, this demand is reasonable.

If the elements of sexual education are to be imparted in early childhood, it is quite clear who ought to be the teacher.  There should be no question that this privilege belongs by every right to the mother.  Except where a child is artificially separated from his chief parent it is indeed only the mother who has any natural opportunity of receiving and responding to these questions.  It is unnecessary for her to take any initiative in the matter.  The inevitable awakening of the child’s intelligence and the evolution of his boundless curiosity furnish her love and skill with all opportunities for guiding her child’s thoughts and knowledge.  Nor is it necessary for her to possess the slightest technical information at this stage.  It is only essential that she should have the most absolute faith in the purity and dignity of her physical relationship to her child, and be able to speak of it with frankness and tenderness.  When that essential condition is fulfilled every mother has all the knowledge that her young child needs.

Among the best authorities, both men and women, in all the countries where this matter is attracting attention, there seems now to be unanimity of opinion in favor of the elementary facts of the baby’s relationship to its mother being explained to the child by the mother as soon as the child begins to ask questions.  Thus in Germany Moll has repeatedly argued in this sense; he insists that sexual enlightenment should be mainly a private and individual matter; that in schools there should be no general and personal warnings about masturbation, etc. (though at a later age he approves of instruction in regard to venereal diseases), but that the mother is the proper person to impart intimate knowledge to the child, and that any age is suitable for the commencement of such enlightenment, provided it is put into a form fitted for the age (Moll, op. cit., p. 264).

At the Mannheim meeting of the Congress of the German Society for Combating Venereal Disease, when the question of sexual enlightenment formed